Oh, fatter than ever, but the only time I hear that old handle is from the Nuthouse gang, and in particular, from you. That's cool though. Too bad "Space" was long taken before you got to AOL. Man, I had written you off for good after two phone calls (I think) were not returned and you blew me off a mere week before I thought I was traveling to Philly for a ballgame or hosting you here in DC. Whew! Glad to see you made it back into the scene. We'll certainly have to catch up.
Life is pretty much the same ole shake for us. I'm been doing freelance web design for some time now in addition to working on my own stuff when I can pull something together. What's your computer fix look like these days? Oh yeah, that reminds me, we were gonna lend you this old Mac Classic. Reckon now that you've resurfaced on AOL, you must have finally snagged a modern machine somehow somewhere.
We kept a rather low profile this holiday season, and for most of this year actually. We're definitely feeling our ages, even Sue, a wonderhorse for years of party thirst for rowdy times far beyond the call of duty. She still keeps close to her wine bottle on a nightly basis, but I have cut back my drinking to almost a monthly rather than the thrice weekly routine of the past decade or so. Of course food, bad greasy, chunk exploding food has a way of finding itself into my mouth, and it's not a pretty sight or a healthy feeling. I've really got to get myself on a healthier track. My pains are too mind-numbing to detail, and all these bloated beastly Hollywoodites are dropping like candied farley flies. Scary man. In this age of processed instant gratification, we have processed on an accelerated scale. The fork in the road has a greater fraction of us living longer well past what our grandparents expected and another greater fraction are dropping even earlier than diagnosed due to all the crap we pump through our eager holes and soft machine cylinders. No doubt I fall into the latter category. A complete mess, a distant cry from that young sprout glistening with undeniable untapped potential oh once upon a time.
See there, see here. Sob stories abound. You know you're gonna have to cough up some tales of the torrid past eventually, but yes, you have found me. It's good to have you back on the E-train. The phonecalls were fun but I'm usually far too self-conscious and enfeebled in telephone conversation unless I'm drunk (with its own accompanying pitfalls) but writing just flows like blood on the money most of the time. Besides I can get away with pretentious floods of irregular phrasings the oral traditions just don't usually allow, eh.
Yes indeed. Seattle's back on the map. Atlanta's a dying breed. The front office has lost its mind, and the bats grow cold in the clutch. Geez, Louise, what's there to say. You'll have to check out my web sites one of these days, if'n you've got enough machinepop. Since I don't know your condition I'll save the details of that stuff for later. Happy New Year and all that jazz. The neighborhood was crackling last night for about a half hour after the calendar flipped pages. I was suprised Sue didn't even roll over in bed because she was insisting that she wanted to watch the silver ball drop on TV, but I knew she wasn't going to make it since she was already nodding out at eleven.
Meanwhile I was standing in line debating whether I should sell my ticket for a profit and leave the lonesome scene with Sue & Ken instead. They insisted I stay to see the man who was nominated last year for a Nobel in Literature (believe it, it's true. He lost to a Italian septegenarian novelist whom I'd never heard of . . .)
Saw Bob Dylan in an up-close and personal venue a few weeks ago, early December, when he was in town to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Kennedy Center. I wasn't there THAT night, but we caught him at the 9:30 Club the night prior to the Kennedy. We'd stood in line for several hours in the cold gnarly AM when tickets went on sale earlier that month only to be among about three hundred turned away. On the second night of the show (he played two nights there to a thousand bobbing heads each), Sue, Ken Borden (an old friend of Bob Blumstein), and I stood again outside hoping to score three tix. Borden had successfully found entry the night before, benefactor of a simple twist of fate. An old friend of his carried an extra after his girlfriend bailed with sickness. Instead of drawing lots, we rationalized in which order each of us would be entitled to tickets as they surfaced. Three hours later the line hadn't moved and no tickets were within shouting distance. Finally I saw an old friend. Lo and behold, he had a friend trying to dump one. That was mine. Bought it for fifty bucks, fifteen over advance price. Borden and another chick we chatted up that night had paid eighty the night before. I owned the first ticket since Borden had seen Dylan the previous night, and Sue had gone to the Stones at the Air Arena (basketball/hockey) a few week prior, a gig I passed on even though the tickets were free. Sue, at my suggestion, then invited and was escorted by old pal Tom Howell who enjoyed himself much more than I possibly could have sitting in the stars and seeing nothing but smoke and hearing little but poorly packaged noise. Meanwhile I was standing in line debating whether I should sell my ticket for a profit and leave the lonesome scene with Sue & Ken instead. They insisted I stay to see the man who was nominated last year for a Nobel in Literature (believe it, it's true. He lost to a Italian septegenarian novelist whom I'd never heard of . . .)
Finally the line was moving. We hung together until I was frisked at the door. I waved goodbye. No more tickets. Sue was to get the next available entry, since she hadn't seen Bob, but now even that seemed a moot point. I had barely pushed my way into the place, among the last dozen in line, up cozy to the closest bar, when I hear Borden wailing and Sue jibberishly in joy waving arms akimbo. They'd made it. Two more tickets at fifty bucks a pop. We were all there snuggling among other Dylanistas, an older crowd speckled with the occasional fresh bunny or hardly harried hipster comfortably awed. Downside. Beers cost $4.50 apiece, and we all wanted at least three.
GT
P.S. Bob lived up to expectations again, spending most of the night banging out notes on a twelve string. This was my fourth time seeing Dylan. Worth every dime. Most money I've every spent on a ticket.
Dear Macstop—congratulations on your fresh startup. I would very much like to be considered for a news scout position on your staff, having read your notice on the Evangelist this morning. First, a few things about me, my wife, and my dog:
We have been Macsurvivalists since 1987, when my wife and I purchased our first Macintosh SE a few months after she had talked her small lobbying firm into revolutionizing the typewriter set by jumping onto the Mac bandwagon. She is the network administrator as well as the financial manager of the small office of about thirty Macs. What I don't know about the user end of the Macintosh, either she does, or within a few hours we both know what we didn't know yesterday. The Macintosh has been a fun ride.
As a freelance writer and graphics specialist for the past five years, my clients have ranged from a construction company to a bi-weekly newspaper, a horse association to a lobbying firm. Toss in a book publisher and the tall orders of small fries off the street, well, let's just say I've pretty much covered the Mac beat in all its glorious detail. My small home office (SOHO), with gleaming emphasis on the home part of the acronym, now consists of an 8500/120, a Performa 6400/200, and an old maxed-out Mac IIx with 32 megs of RAM and a Daystar turbo card kicking that bad baby up to the 68040 level, all connected to an ethernet hub for the lightening fast transfers poor LocaTalk just can't match. This new hot connection was a fantastic boon to my senses. "Wow! How fast can that firewire get!"
I've promised to loan it to a computerless, ex-DOS man, an old E-mail friend presently living in that other Washington, in the backwaters of Seattle. His 286 died a horrible death two years ago, and you know how it is, nobody writes, telephoning is such a bore, but since his machine died, that thrice a week E-mail habit has vanished along with him. He is flying east to visit his mom and old pals sometime this spring. I will drive to Philly where his mother lives just to loan him the "little" Mac, which of course he should be able to carry onto the plane with him for the flight back to the Pacific.
We hubbed it all together just last weekend, in preparation for converting the Mac IIx to a full fledged web server over a dedicated 28.8 or ISDN line. Of course I prefer the latter solution. The low bandwidth 28.8 modem approach is working for a lot of people these days running small businesses and personal sites, but we like the best, and the best today is a 2B 128K home ISDN connection for someone who is just a few hairs shy of wanting to operate his own ISP. And to think I've only been surfing the web for just over fifteen months. Well, yes, I still have my original AOL account, signing on way back in 1992 when they boasted a mere 250,000 subscribers, but hey, let's not blow that horn today.
Last year's prices for ISDN access locally, are no doubt rolling over in their graves as they squint at current market numbers. Alas, my own household pockets are still a mite shallow, so I still have to hold my horses, as my wife the horselover is always telling me. Oh yeah there's that Mac Classic II sitting on the floor with the ethernet hub sitting on top, just waiting to be used as a POP3 server, or some other equally slick job description, but for now I've promised to loan it to a computerless, ex-DOS man, an old E-mail friend presently living in that other Washington, in the backwaters of Seattle. His 286 died a horrible death two years ago, and you know how it is, nobody writes, telephoning is such a bore, but since his machine died, that thrice a week E-mail habit has vanished along with him. He is flying east to visit his mom and old pals sometime this spring. I will drive to Philly where his mother lives just to loan him the "little" Mac, which of course he should be able to carry onto the plane with him for the flight back to the Pacific. But I'll demand my machine back once he is able to save up enough money to buy a modern screamer as I'm sure it won't die on him like his last machine did. Meanwhile he wants to join AOL. We've loaded and test-driven AOL 2.7 on the little charmer. Amazing! With a 28.8 modem, while the AOL's graphic-intensive interface, of course, doesn't show up in color, it looks terrific and serves up rather quickly. It'll be great to get Kenny back in the saddle!
P.S. Oh by the way, like my friend's old PC, my dog of thirteen years just died. Too bad he wasn't a Mac...
As a Macintosh-inclined Netsharker (my term, has anyone trademarked it yet?), I love the feeding frenzy of the Internet as my daily ingestion of Mac-oriented newsgroups and listservs attest. With thirty-five megs of systems extensions loading into my world with every reboot, there is no doubt in my mind that I can be an asset to your staff and a beacon to the world. Hosted on a virtual server, my homepage is located at:
although currently being given a fresh makeover, so potholes are everywhere. In closing, while literature and philosophical treatises are my first delusions of grandeur in a world full of mud, I must now proclaim in loud bold italics, "Literary pretensions of my youth, move aside. Philosophy might be an oyster on the halfshell, but everybody's got a philosophy. Not everybody's got a Macintosh running the best OS the world has ever known."
Bottom line? I want to be a Macstop reporter! Somebody with my kind of enthusiasm just might make the difference. For further information please contact me,
Gabriel Thy
202-543-xxxx
P.S. Oh by the way, like my friend's old PC, my dog of thirteen years just died. Too bad he wasn't a Mac...
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 97 17:38:50 -0500
Gabriel, I enjoyed the letter you sent me. It sounds like you have quite a bit of Macintosh experience. We'd be very interested in having you as a news scout. Although we can't compensate right now, we are confident that if our best news writers stick with us, they will reap the benefits later. Is there any chance you could write news reports daily? Please reply with what type of capacity you'd like to work in. Thanks.
Best of Regards,
Ben Wilson, Editor In Chief/Publisher
Macintosh Roadstop (http://www.macstop.com)
With my roots thigh deep into the Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson gonzo approach to minding my own business, I think we might very well develop a beautiful relationship here. A report a day? Mmmmm...reminds me of Bill Burroughs, hey, reminds me of myself, but let's figure it this way: I wake up every day with an urge to do something Macintosh.
Okay Ben...I can read the signs on the goalpost. This ain't no MacWorld, or EvangeList, YET. But considering I'm working from one scent to the next, I'll accept your proposal for a tour of duty with Roadstop. You're looking for a daily report? Mmmm, on what pray tell? I've been told I'm an opinionmaker. Does that make me just another Mac Evangelist? Do I get a personal column or am I devoted a "news" inches status? What is news, if I scarf it up from online sources? Credentials? I have no inroads with the bigboys, except as a "rabid devourer" of many newsgroups. Frankly, I'm afraid since you are the editor-in-chief, you must offer me a twig or two to grasp.
At this point, I'm hip to YOUR needs, but I need to know what those needs are. Since this is an uncompensated position, as you point out, at this time, I want to make sure that I'm not running myself silly creating for someone else while I am neglecting my own domain. Like that last philosopher put it, "Hell I can pay myself nothing, and still do twice as much for myself as I can for somebody else who barely knows me from that stump over there."
Bottom line? I'll pitch your cause. Just dictate a few parameters. With my roots thigh deep into the Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson gonzo approach to minding my own business, I think we might very well develop a beautiful relationship here. A report a day? Mmmmm...reminds me of Bill Burroughs, hey, reminds me of myself, but let's figure it this way: I wake up every day with an urge to do something Macintosh. As far as I've been able to discern from our two encounters (let's not forget the Evangelist), all I need to do is write an undeveloped number of Macintosh-driven paragraphs in an E-mail to you. Well, sure, I can handle one more E-mail a day especially since I'll be getting a byline and helping a bunch of swell folks get ahead in the world of Macintosh web publishing. Say when...
Regards not retreads,
Gabriel Thy
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 97 20:34:12
Gabriel, you are obviously an excellent writer and communicator. I'm glad you can write daily. To simply request press releases from companies is an excellent way to get news. Lurking around in newsgroups also helps.
Although we may not be a huge publication yet, we are trying to build a publication that will be viable (and hopefully profitable) in the near future. Thus we are looking for good writers who are willing to stick it out with us. Growing is tough, but we'll get there sooner or later. You can send news reports in a simple e-mail message. I'll try to drop you a lead whenever possible. Right now I'm writing most of the news for the site, so I'm a bit lagged.
It's hard to be the main writer of, edit, advertise, hold correspondence, etc. for a a site that I'm not even getting paid for. All of the profits go directly to expanding, improving, and saving for the site so it can pat off later. Fortunately, I have a very helpful assistant who lives in New Zealand that edits a lot of the articles that are submitted. It helps out a lot. I hope we can both be beneficial from this. Believe me, I'm not in this to be a money grubber. I'd give money to the volunteers before I myself pocketed a single penny.
Fats, the weather out here has been uncharacteristically cold lately. At night it's getting down in the low 30's. We've even had light snows. It wasn't this way last winter. But at least it's not nearly as pitiful as what you north-easterners have contended with.
Can't wait till SuperBowl Sunday. I'm probably gonna yell myself hoarse & drink myself staggering drunk that day, especially if it's a close game. I'll be going to a party at Sarah & Laurie's pad, not that those names should mean anything to you. And not that either of their bodies are so familiar to me. But it should be an interesting day nonetheless. Go Steelers!
The baseball owners have approved interleague play begining in '97. Now the players have to agree to it to make it a reality. When they'll do that I don't know. I've heard they won't make that decision until a collective bargaining agreement comes. The way it's set to work is that each team will play 15-16 games against teams of the other league. And it'll be just east vs. east, central vs. central & west vs. west divisions. So the Phillies won't be coming to Seattle under this plan. Personally, I don't like these proposed changes. Or maybe it's just the timing. These folks have their priorities all out of order. If they think that they're gonna win back fans with this crap instead of concentrating on straightening out the economics 1st, then they're only fooling themselves. Not until the day where the majority of players take Ripken's attitudes will the fans truly 'come back'.
I suppose every relationship has its own unique balance & only the ones in it can know what will irreversably push it out of balance. But if I understand what you're saying, Sue's giving you the freedom to go out & play. And you, you seem hesitant to take her up on that. Good luck.
I recently went out & bought me a pair of rollerblades. I needed something semi-fun to open a door for some exercise. So far I haven't been able to get out & use them so much with all the wet weather. But I'm glad I finally made the effort to do something physical. Something's got to control this gut of mine from pushing across my lap when I sit down.
At work we're currently going through some tough contract negotiations between our union & management. Yesterday, they gave us our benefits package options then told us we needed to turn them in by today. And in the absence of an agreement, we don't even know how much money they plan on taking out of our checks to cover each plan. So how the hell can we make such a decision? That's just an example of the tactics we've been confronting. As if it's not enough that we may be faced with salary cuts & cuts in our vacation time. Meanwhile, there's a pay freeze & the layoffs haven't ended. Where's Jimmy Hoffa when you need him?
As far as your marriage situation goes, I don't know if there's much I can respond to what you're telling me. I suppose every relationship has its own unique balance & only the ones in it can know what will irreversably push it out of balance. But if I understand what you're saying, Sue's giving you the freedom to go out & play. And you, you seem hesitant to take her up on that. Good luck.
Space
"Ignorance and virtue suck on the same straw. Souls grow on bones, but die beneath bankers' hours.""
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
YouTube
