Lunar Obverse

Good and Cheap, a free cookbook by Leanne Brown

Leanne Brown offers a free PDF cookbook based around the idea of eating well for around US$4.00 per day, coincidentally the rule of thumb for providing SNAP benefits to low-income Americans.

Just Putting These Here So They Can Be Part of the Permanent Record

John Scalzi calls out those who are trying to describe the Charleston terrorist’s actions as anything but racist.

Not that there probably still aren’t people who are willing to try to pretzel themselves into arguing it’s something other than racism or racial hatred. So, you know, again, and to be clear: If you are arguing that a white man who clearly held racist beliefs, going into a place where he knew he would find black people, waiting an hour in pretend fellowship with them, announcing he was there to shoot black people, shooting them while spouting racist comments at them while they begged him to stop killing them, reloading several times, and then when arrested declaring that the reason he was killed all those innocent people was to start a race war, wasn’t motivated by racism and racial hatred,

a) you are so very laughably wrong;

b) you are being as racist as you can possibly be.

Sitting at dinner with friends last night, celebrating Terry’s 50th birthday, he revealed something that showed I could still be surprised by a man I had known for almost four decades.

“You introduced me to Star Wars,” he said.

I couldn’t begin to process this. I had known about Star Wars since before the movie had even been released: in the mid-70s, I had been a member of the Science Fiction Book Club of America, which, in the days before Amazon and the Kindle, was a way to put cheap physical (I kind of hate that I have to specify that nowadays) copies of current scifi and fantasy works into the hands of readers from sea to shining sea, purple mountains’ majesty and fruited plains alike. Basically every month they would send a pamphlet outlining the two main selections and some secondary ones, and if I did nothing, they would send me a copy of each main selection (and bill me, or, much more accurately, bill my parents, since I was 11 or 12 at the time).

At some point in early 1977, one of the main selections of the SFBCA was “Star Wars”, by “George Lucas”, a writer with which I had no prior familiarity. Being one of the main selections put this Mr. Lucas on the same level as Asimov, Heinlein, or Clarke. I now know that this was a novelization of the movie, and the book was ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster, a writer whose acquaintance I would not make until I discovered the Star Wars sequel “Splinter of The Mind’s Eye”, on a wire rack in the books section of our local one-stop-shopping-center. But in 1977, reading that pamphlet from the SFBCA, and seeing the cover picture of a blond-haired man holding a laser sword while a woman dressed in white with an improbable hairstyle pointed a gun off-page, with the giant black helmeted… robot? looming over them: I just knew I had to read this story. So I asked mom if I could get this month’s main selection, and she said yes, and some time after, read about Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia and Han Solo.

The Book Club edition of the Star Wars novelization.

I read that book before the movie came out. Long before Star Wars became pop culture, I was immersed in backstory. More to the point, this all happened at least a year before I met Terry. Star Wars came out the summer between my 6th grade elementary school days (at North Oak Grove Elementary), and my 7th grade junior high school days (at Oak Grove Junior High). At Oak Grove Junior High, my Star Wars collector’s habits grew. I bought more books, including the trade paperback The Star Wars Sketchbook, which I would use as guides to drawing my own versions of Star Wars vehicles, painstakingly tracing the lines of an X-Wing or TIE Fighter. Outside of classes, I would get permission to use the overhead projectors to shine an image from the book, enlarged, onto a larger sheet of paper, and recreate the images, poster-sized.

After school I would walk across the street to the corner store, and buy packets of the Star Wars trading cards, trying to collect a full set of each color series. I was unsuccessful, I think, and even then, I never cared enough about them to protect them and set them aside. I just liked looking at the pictures. I got the action figures. I bought the comic books. My parents got me the bed cover. Posters for my bedroom wall. And every magazine that had even the tiniest bit of Star Wars news: interviews with George Lucas or the actors or special effects technicians. Everything. In a world without a global internetwork of connected devices, using only my local retail outlets of book stores, grocery stores, magazine stands, and toy stores, I tried to get it all.

In 1978, local politics closed down Oak Grove Junior High, and after summer’s end, the students were split off by geography to other junior highs. I ended up at Milwaukie Junior High, essentially joining a program already in progress. Although some of my friends and classmates from the previous year were also new, most of the students attending 8th grade at MJH were already familiar with each other. I remember feeling like a new kid once again, out of place. But Star Wars proved to be a common language, a way to connect to this new group of people.

Which is funny, because that’s not how I remember meeting Terry for the first time.

I also had an interest in photography, shared with my dad, and my dad had given me for Christmas 1977 my own camera, a single-lens-reflex 35mm Fuji. The camera was how I met Terry.

Terry was one of the entrenched crowd; he had been going to school with most of these other students since kindergarten. I had only been in Milwaukie, OR since 3rd grade, so I had less history with almost everyone around me. And at some point in that first week at a new school, with that camera hanging from my neck, I was standing in the hallway between classes only to be interrupted by Terry asking if he could borrow the camera for a minute.

Look, this was 37 years ago, so I don’t remember the exact details. My vague remembrance is that he wanted to take a picture of a girl. I had noticed girls by then but was far too fearful to actually talk to them much. But Terry, even at that young age, recognized the valuable role technology would have in bringing people together. He borrowed my camera, got a picture or two of some girl he’d been flirting with, and gave me the camera back, saying that when I got the film developed that he’d like to see the pictures.

It sounds funny now, but in my 13 year old mind at the time, that meant we were a team. Sharing the pictures led to our spending more time together. And then, at some point, that meant talking about Star Wars. This is where I should have Terry write out his own memories, because this is the part I do not remember at all. In my head, Terry and I have always been fans of Star Wars. But at his birthday dinner last night, Terry said that I handed him my copy of The Star Wars Sketchbook, and changed his life. He looked through the pictures, and I told him about the movie that the pictures were created for, and then he must have gone to see it, because it was playing continuously in Portland theaters and would be until 1980, when the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, would be released.

The Star Wars Sketchbook, by Joe Johnston, published in September 1977 by Del Ray.

That we would each have such different memories of where our friendship began is remarkable, made even more so by our not comparing notes until almost 4 decades later. But people love their round-number birthdays. It’s not surprising that we would get sentimental and nostalgic on such occasions.

Happy birthday, Terry. And many more to come.

I wasn’t sure what to write about today. I have an idea for a post but it requires research and whatnot, so I saved that one as a draft. This one is just going to be a simple list for now. I’m going to answer the question, what was happening the year I was born? What’s changed?

1964 was a leap year, apparently. That doesn’t really affect me, though, because I was born in December; no extra days for me until 1968.

I was born on a Monday. According to Wikipedia, no important world events happened on the 28th day of December, 1964. The day before that, the Cleveland Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts by a score of 27-0. Two days later, the UN established the UN Conference on Trade and Development. OK, those are boring.

The month I was born, the second James Bond film, Goldfinger, was released in the US. Oregon, my home state, was experiencing one of the most destructive floods of its history. The Steel Bridge’s lower deck was submerged by the Willamette River, and the waterfalls in Oregon City were apparently not a waterfall at all.

On the radio, the #1 song in the US was “I Feel Fine” by The Beatles, which had beaten out “Come See About Me” by The Supremes the week before. On TV, were shows like “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” and “No Time for Sergeants” on ABC, “The Andy Griffith Show” and The Lucy Show” on CBS, and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Andy Williams Show” on NBC.

I had several more paragraphs here, but an accidental swipe on my trackpad wiped it all out, and I’m too tired and sad now to re-create it. Maybe tomorrow.

Since my 50th birthday is approaching, I’ve been thinking about milestones in my life. The events or decisions where life changed for me. I wonder how many I can think of and name?

My earliest memory is clearly my first conscious milestone. While there are events important to me that took place before my earliest memory, like being born, my older sisters’ births, or my parents meeting, the first thing I can remember must have been the start of my conscious, continuous existence, right?

Unfortunately, I can’t think of when my first memory actually occurred. And since memories are made in the same area of the brain as imaginary thoughts, I can’t be sure it even happened at all.

The memory is of me, standing near a swing set, in a fenced in yard. The swing set looms high above me, and the fence is taller than I am. I’m wearing a warm, comfortable, blue corduroy hooded coat. It’s cold out, gray skies, windy, and mom is approaching me. I believe, since I’ve talked about this with my parents in the past, that the memory is from when we lived in Seattle or the Seattle area briefly, and I must have been very young, 1 or 2 maybe.

That narrows it down to 1965-1966, I suppose.

I vaguely remember, later, the family moving to Kalama, Washington, and into an apartment building near downtown Kalama. That’s the first place that I thought of as “home”, and that I can remember the interior of.

I have a lot of memories from that home, but they’re discontinuous. That’s where mom found me, around age 3, reading the Sunday comics to my year-older sister, and not just looking at the pictures. In my experience, I’ve always been able to read; I learned how to do it at such an early age it just feels like something I was born doing. If I was 3 years old, then those memories take place in 1968 (since my birthday is so late in the year).

I also remember watching the Apollo astronauts launching on television in that living room in Kalama. I don’t know if it was Apollo 11, though, the first manned landing on the moon, which happened between 16 July and 24 July 1969, or one of the earlier non-landing missions, which started in 1968. My memory is that I was watching a manned mission, though, because I remember telling my mom that I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up; what could be more natural than a kid named Moon, going to the moon?

The apartment was below street level on one side, and I remember windows placed up high looking in to the kitchen area. One October, as we were bringing in groceries from a trip to the store, mom pointed up at the window and me and my sister were shocked to see a skeleton in that window. I’m sure it was a kid in a costume, or dad playing a prank. It shocked me but didn’t really scare me, at least as I remember it now, 45+ years later.

I could probably draw a map of that apartment now, although I have no way of knowing if it would be accurate or not. I can find it on Google Maps, however, and its satellite images tell me that the apartment building is still there. It’s an L-shaped building, with a shared patio inside the angle of the L, and from the patio there is a stairway that leads down to an alley, and from there to the main street of Kalama, right next to the Post Office.

Hopefully dad or my sister will pop up here and fill in the details and dates of when we lived here, and correct my unreliable memory, or maybe confirm it. It felt like a brief time; soon after, we moved further away from downtown Kalama (which is tiny, even today) into a fourplex that felt like it was out in the country, and Google Maps tells me is 4.2 miles from the Kalama Post Office, or an 8 minute drive.

But those memories are for a different post.

In exactly 30 days I will be celebrating my 50th birthday. That’s a lot of birthdays.

In 1989, I turned 25 years old. Half my life ago.

In 1989, I was working at a near-minimum wage job, in a shopping mall, selling games. The store was, in fact, called Endgames, which was supposed to be a Samuel Beckett reference, one I’ve never bothered to look up. Minimum wage in Oregon back then was $3.35 an hour. According to my annual Social Security letter, for calendar year 1989 I earned $11,391. Assuming a full-time job, that means I worked for around $5.47 an hour. Considering how lazy I was, I doubt that I worked any overtime at all.

With that money I paid for my car, a nutmeg brown Porsche 924, ate a lot of fast food, and bought comic books and gaming stuff. Maybe some clothes now and then. I still lived with my parents (I wouldn’t move out until the following year, into an apartment I would share with two high school friends, Andy and Rod). I had no steady girlfriend and went on, maybe, one or two dates with women I met at the mall. I had no ambitions at all. I just wanted to keep working at the games store, playing D&D, watching TV, and eating delicious food that was terrible for me.

As I look back, I think I took the idea of not having any ambition to undreamt of levels. The entire concept of dreaming of doing something else didn’t even cross my mind. It feels alien to me now, just thinking about it. I had a vague sense that my mom, dad, my sister, all of them were frustrated with me, but for what I had no idea. My friends all seemed to accept me as I was. But if you’d asked me what the future would hold for me, I would have just shrugged and changed the subject, or talked vaguely of having more money at some unspecified point, without any real sense of what I could be doing to reach it.

If someone had suggested I go to school and get a degree, it felt like an unreachable goal to me. The money I made flowed through my hands like water and I rarely had anything left from one paycheck to the next. School costs money, and I was working 40 hours a week already; if I took time off to go to school, how would I earn the money I needed?

I was ignorant, and I think, now, that I was ashamed enough of being ignorant that I didn’t ask any questions that might have cured my ignorance, or even led in that direction.

I had a whole lot of failure ahead of me before I would ever learn to plan ahead.

Compiling paperwork for my lawyer is something I never, ever, ever imagined I would say.

This headache is probably because I haven’t put any caffeine into me, and not the outcome of the two delicious Jubelales I drank last night (thanks, Ken!).

I only realized I hadn’t turned on the heat when I noticed my phone is overheating. It’s the warmest thing in the apartment.

My apologies. Been working hard at my day job, plus caught a cold. More stories are coming. Just need a little rest.

Thanks for reading!

Pulled from my files. Has my writing changed in 14 years? Comment if you can tell the difference.

It had been a long night, lots of work done, boxes packed and moved and labeled. Chester pulled his jacket a little closer, and pulled the collar up against his neck; although it was spring, the wind tonight lacked warmth. It was late, and Chester had had to walk home since his car was stolen two weeks ago. He walked the length of the long park that lay between the warehouse where he worked and his home sweet home, his humble abode, the four walls between which he called his “space”.

The grass, freshly mowed, looked greyish under the starlight, except where it was yellowed from the sodium-colored lamps along the pathway. Chester passed the playground, not looking up at the huddled shapes of teenagers brooding over some imagined slight. He walked swiftly past the smell of the public restrooms.

But he stopped by the pond. It was still and silent, deep and blue-black, unnaturally still considering the wind that sapped the heat from Chester tonight. The groves of trees stood watch over the water’s dark surface, swaying together, now apart, seeming like the kids Chester had seen on the field moments before. Chester shivvered, tired from his work and the late hour, and imagined that the lake went down forever, an endless shaft of water sunk through the Earth.

Chester had never learned to swim. He had a fascination with it, wondering what it would be like to frolic and glide through it, but his fear had kept him from it. It called to him, but he was afraid to answer it.

When he reached home, and his bed, he dreamt of fighting a huge winged snake.

*****

After another two weeks of time-and-a-half, Chester’s boss allowed as how the workload had eased off enough for Chester to take some time off. Chester hadn’t taken a vacation in nearly two years, and wasn’t sure what to do. But he remembered that night two weeks before, standing before the pond, shaking with cold and also with fear, and he decided that he would try to improve himself by learning to swim. The water’s call to him was stronger than his fear of it. He hoped.

Down at the local YMCA, there was a sign-up sheet for swimming lessons. Chester approached the board, and realized that he had not brought a pen. He turned around, looking for an office or someone official looking to request one.

“Excuse me… you look lost. Can I help you?”

Chester turned and faced a slender beauty. Her hair was soft, wavy, and so dark it was almost blue. Her eyes were a startling shade of green, and they were set in a face that was almost elfin. She had a smile, and she held a clipboard. A pen was tucked behind her left ear.

“Oh, right, I was just going to… uh….” Chester waved vaguely at the sign-up board. “I want to swim. Or, to be able to swim. Swimming lessons.”

“Excellent! I can handle that for you. I’m the instructor! Well, one of them, anyway.” She pulled the pen from behind her ear and paused with it in the air over her clipboard. “Name?”

“My name is Chester. Chester Hogan. I do hope, that is, I’m looking for a beginner’s class.”

“Fair enough… I can sign you up for the class that begins on Tuesday evening, at 7 pm, or the Wednesday afternoon class at 1:30. Which would you prefer?”

“Tomorrow evening should be fine. Where do I pay?”

“That’s my class!” She scribbed on the sheet. “Oh, you can pay in the office.” She tore a sheet off her clipboard. “Just take this over there.” She pointed over to a door marked ‘OFFICE’. She smiled again, hugged the clipboard to her chest, and bounced on her feet. “See you there!”

Chester had to borrow a pen to sign the check.

That afternoon, he made a chicken salad sandwich and ate it in the park, looking out at the pond. A flock of ducks were swimming, diving, and taking off from its waters, and he envied the ease with which they played in it. Of course, on dry land, a duck seemed out of place, like a man wearing shoes that were too tight. Chester felt that a duck was his complete opposite. The thought saddened him.