I just got a high-school friend’s obit via email from another old pal; it’s put me in a musing state.

The decedent was someone who utterly transformed after high-school, from a prototypical stoner kid into an academic superstar whose career trajectory, according to the obit, had most recently involved work in the DC area, bridging government and academe. The obit specified no cause of death, and email correspondence with others revealed that it was uncertain.

He was in his early thirties and although I can’t swear to it, I believe I understood that his early college career was founded on a track scholarship. Which leads me to impute a later-life level of health-consciousness on his part, and that leads to the sort of “he just… died?” thoughts that are dancing about my pate at the moment.

mmf.

UPDATE: An hour later, another passing. Another friend of ours, in California, died in a diving accident yesterday. Both men were redheads, I just now realized. My high-school friend didn’t seem to have left a wife and kids, but our California pal does.

It’s a sad day.

That’s about six years old. Both long hair and facial hair are gone. Silly facial hair grown for Halloween, a magnificent Regency swordsman’s get up. I may have had a great floppy hat as well. Arrr.

Sorry for the dearth of postings – the trip, combined with some media projects here at home, are soaking up my brain and free time.

The media projects are associated with creating a DVD from an old VHS tape of a reunion perfomance by the Gizmos shot the last day of July in 1988 – the tape was edited and directed by Eric White at the cable-access staion in Bloomington, BCAT 3, which unfortunately at the time only made VHS cameras available to program producers except for in-studio work.

The tape is pretty good in every way except video quality – I’m actually quite impressed with Eric’s editing.

It being September again, I should note that Eric was working on the editing throughout the saga of my sister’s death – and she is quite visible on the tape, as am I, dancing and dancing. The concert stands at the gates of adulthood; the cost of entry too high to predict.

Happily, watching the video (over and over and over as I work the kinks out of the workflow here) is not saddening in the least – it’s almost like a video yearbook, and I find myself pointing at the fifteen-year-old video ghosts of my friends and calling their names:

“There’s Ransom!”

“It’s Katherine!”

“That’s Terri!”

May I just say:

and note that further imagery exploring the artistic effects of light abd shadow involved in my recent visit to my in-laws in Laguna Beach on a perfect late-summer weekend may be found here, here, here, and here.

Worthy of note were the amusingly provocative Oracle banners at the SeaTac federal screening positions:

“Oracle makes Linux unbreakable: Everybody knows Linux costs less. Now it’s faster and more reliable too.”

Translation: “Bill, your software broke last month. Loved it! See you soon – love, Larry.”

I also actually went swimming in the ocean for the first time in at least twenty years. It was fun, but, naturally, I seem to have an ear infection. Every time I get in the water, my head soaks it up like a sponge and it dribbles out for days and days.

We were there for my father-in-law’s 75th birthday party, and it was great fun.

The trip ended with United’s outbound plane experiencing starter failure in an engine – they put us on a direct Alaskan flight that we barely made, and which was so empty I cannot imagine how they can run the service.

A pleasant walk about the neighborhood of a summer night’s wee hours is often a salutary endeavor, accompanied or solo.

On this night, amid a quiet unnatural for a city, I spied the winking eye of Mars gazing across the fruited plains of Capitol Hill. I found some scrap wood, half-inch plywood, that is just what I needed to mount a nice keyboard shelf I picked up elewhere, also as scrap because it lacked the needed mounting hardware.

On my return loop, what should I spy but a lovingly-cared-for Pontiac Tempest, the first family car I can recall. Ours was a ’67 convertible in an ice-blue flake. This was an aquamarine hardtop with what I’m assuming is a restoration job on the upholstery in cream leather.

Ours had navy-and-ice-blue vinyl upholstery that stank to high heaven of complex, probably highly toxic vynil gasses under the summer sun, something which seriously undercut the otherwise impeccable beauty of this particluar crossbreed of land yacht and muscle car.

It was an interesting sense-memory to feel the door handles and the interior window-lining brushes.

Although very similar to the car I recall, this car featured an older-looking commercial script logo; the body style was otherwise nearly identical, which means, I suspect, that the car I saw in the night was a ’65 or ’67.

We visited the zoo on Sunday, and I took a bazillion pix.

Highlights:

• Hearing a tiger roar, which made all my hair stand on end. Then we watched him play with a rubber fishing-net float. I got a shot of him bursting through some foliage with his toy right after the roar.
• Watching the gorilla troop – there was a year-or-so old infant hanging around Mom right by the window and all the human toddlers were totally fascinated by him. He was not so interested in the kids, though.
• Standing behind a small porthole viewpoint as a huge grizzly bear strode right up to the window and alternately siffed at the glass, looked me in the eye from a distance of four inches, and scrabbled at the glass with his huge, huge paws. It took pretty much all my will not to obey the adrenaline that poured into my veins and run away shrieking and gibbering. It was neat. Sadly, my slo-poke camera’s shot buffer was full and the images I attempted to take were not written to memory card.

Here he is, headed right for me.

Today, in order to properly demonstrate my commitment to the candidcacy for the Governorship of California, I awakened hurriedly, twisted in the sheets, in danger of missing my bus to the University District for a press screening of the Claude Lelouch film, “And Now Ladies and Gentlemen” starring Jeremy Irons and Patricia Kaas.

Fortunately, I made it to the theater a cool twenty minutes ahead of the noon showing. Since it’s for a review to be published later and elsewhere, modesty forbids me to reveal my opinion in any meaning ful way – a discipline I find useful in my campaign appearances.

The film is bilingual, roughly equally in French and English, and the characters and actors slip in between the languages with the ease and grace of parters sliping in between the sheets in old-fashioned French sex farces.

This is the second film in a few weeks that Tablet’s sent me to that features a heavy use of French, and it’s proving to be plumb good for my French language muscle – I leave the theater thinking in French, itching to speak it again.

On my second campaign appearance, I attended the Tablet staff meeting in Belltown ad met many of my fellow contributors, finding, unsurprisingly, that many shared acquaintances already link us. Notable among these shared acquaintances was Olympia, Washington’s beloved Chuck Swaim. All in all it was a pleasant get together and it was nice to put faces to names.

Soo…

I was closing in on a server-side software debug (updating Marc Liyanage’s PHP 4.3.0 to 4.3.2r7, if you care) when

BANG

All the lights in the house went out – this was around 9pm on Monday night, the fourth of August. Viv and I stumbled around in the dark for a few mintues, trying to remember where the flashlights were, lighting candles, and eventually made it outside.

The whole neighborhood was dark, and the very last reflections of post-sunset dusk still illuminated the sky. A half-moon shone on broken clouds. After a few more minutes of puttering around the house, I noticed that the streetlights and traffic lights went out as well. Our apartment building sits at the intersection of two very busy streets, and drivers immediately began speeding through in both directions without stopping, those traveling along Twelfth often passing the darkened intersection at speeds that appeared to surpass forty miles an hour.

People started emerging from their darkened apartments, and everyone was talking with each other. Eventually I heard from someone who had walked down from above fifteenth that a bus has somehow snapped a power cable.

The lights came back on at five am.

in the interim, lying in my dark, dark, dark bedroom, the night silence outside was as deep as I can recall it ever being in this bustling neighborhood full of young people. No hum of a neighbor’s fridge or throb of a dryer; no high-pitched electrical whine. Somewhere in the distance, someone tentatively explored a melody on a steel drum.

jeebus it hot

the unarchived forecast.

So, it’s like this: Mom and Dad are in town. Yesterday we went to the Museum of Flight and just as we pulled into the parking lot, a paiir of Air Force F-14s flew in low and fast to land at the strip behind the museum. It was distracting to pokey through the parking lot as my fellow airplane geeks all stampeded to the fence.

A few minutes later the advance team for the Blue Angels, which will be providing the ear-shattering in my neighborhood at the end of the week, flew in. It was serendipitous timing – I had no idea that they were arriving yesterday and it was neat to be there with my dad.

Inside, I was disappointed to see that the Gee Bee racer had been disassembled and perched wingless in the parking lot – later, I learned it had been in the Seafair pararde last friday. My disappointment was made up by both the addition since last week of a Rumpler Taube reproduction and my father’s joy at seeing the amazing, unrestored Caproni.

While we were there, one of the two-person articulated flight simulators froze-up – the computer locked in-flight, and the capsule stopped moving. It was elevated by several feet and as we watched the attendants struggle to release it we realized that the capsule was also upside down.

Anyway, it’s been an enjoyable visit from Mom and Dad. Doesn’t look like we’re going to get out to the mountains with them, though. Too bad.