My college friends and I have a private mailing list where we keep in touch, and Rob sent out a link to a blog post he ran across called "The 25 times I almost died" saying it reminded him of me. I had this thing back in college where no one thought I would make it alive to 30. I couldn't come up with 25, but here's what I got:
1) I think it was 1989 and there was a hurricane parked off the North Carolina coast. I was surfing Rodanthe Pier in double overhead waves far larger than my ability to handle them. There were very few people out so I was more or less alone with nobody near me. The waves were breaking really far offshore, past the end of the pier. I took off on a wave and wiped out. I was held under water for quite some time, rolling around. When I struggled to the surface again I realized my surfboard was no longer attached to my leg leash and was nowhere in sight. I was now in the area where the waves were crashing down; the water was way too rough and I was too far out to give me any hope of making it to shore swimming. After a few minutes of struggling and making no progress and seeing no one around me I started realizing that this was probably it for me. I was going to die out there. My strength was almost gone. I had been knocked under water several times by huge waves. I knew I would not be able to struggle to the surface one more time after the next one hit me. Moments later two surfers who had noticed me finally made their way over and rescued me.
2) When I was about 8 my dad had this beat up old chevy van with a bunk in the back. I spent many nights at the local VFW lounge/bar with him. He would sit at the bar getting drunk, I would be in the arcade room reading comic books, playing pinball, shuffle bowling or (later) video games. Eventually I would go out to the van and sleep in it, waking up when his drunk ass pulled into the driveway at home. One night my mom showed up pretty late and took me home in her car because my dad was even drunker than usual but refused to not drive home. That night he wrapped the van around a bridge railing. The bunk area in the back was completely demolished. He lived of course. There are some monsters that just can't be killed.
3) Sophomore year in college, I experimented with this interesting substance the kids called 'shrooms'. In the midst of a rich, confusing and wild experience, I freaked out when I saw the shadows of my friends hands shoot up the wall, across the ceiling and down the other wall towards me, the only thing that stopped me from jumping out the 4th story window was the fact that it was closed so I bounced off. Say no to drugs, kids.
4) Drunk driver swerved head-on into my lane when I was 17 driving a 1976 cherry red camaro full of people. I was sober and had the reflexes of a cat so we escaped with only the left rear quarter panel demolished. Later while my camaro was in the body shop, I flipped a rental car whilst whipping up the emergency brake to do 180s on a gravel road. Totaled it. I had paid an extra dollar for full insurance on the rental though, so it cost me nothing. Before I got my camarao back someone broke into the shop and stole it. They totaled it while driving drunk.
5) In December of 2000 right after the beinning of the second intifada, I took an air courier gig to deliver a Microsoft DVR to Tel Aviv. While there for a few days I took a trip into Palestine and hired a guide to show me around the Bethlehem area. Things were going great until my guide found out that a public bus had just been bombed back in Tel Aviv and they were locking down the border. On the way into Palestine I had gone through a checkpoint on a paved road in a taxi. My guide told me it was best to try to get across the border immediately or else I might be stuck there for days (and miss my flight). He shoved me into a van filled with about 10 people. No one spoke English. I didn't realize it at first, but eventually it dawned on me that we were trying to sneak across the border. The back row was filled with some militant looking young men, I was in the front seat between the driver and his son. Everyone was talking excitedly in Arabic. The driver kept turning up the radio news program so we were bumping along dirt roads amid the desert hills with a cacophony of shouted arabic around me. The only words I understood were Clinton, American and jihad. Dangling charms from the rearview mirror kept hitting me in the face. It was a bit uncomfortable but I would be lying if I said I didn't think it was totally out of control awesome at the time. Every now and then the driver would stop and talk to some militant looking young guy standing beside the dirt tracks we were following. Their conversations always got to the point where they were both staring at me, but eventually we would drive on. The part where I started to get nervous was when I could begin to see the walls of the old city of Jerusalem peaking over the hills as we twisted around them. I realized that if the Israelis just opened fire on the van my chances of survival in the middle of the front seat with no seat belt were pretty slim. There was nothing I could do though, I didn't even have enough room to slouch down behind the dash. But then suddenly we turned a corner onto on a paved road in Jerusalem and I got dropped off at the old city gate.
6) There are countless times when I was doing something stupid in a car with my high school friends where I should have died. There are a lot of empty stretches of road in rural North Carolina that practically demand you do things like have the passenger slide over to take over driving while you're doing 60mph down a remote stretch of highway coming back from Emerald Isle, while you are climbing out the driver's window and onto the roof. Then jump from the roof over to the bed of your friend's pick up truck followed by sliding in his driver's window and taking over driving the truck while his passenger slides out the window, into the back of the truck and then through the passenger window of your car. There's more stories like that than I can really list here. Stuff involving driving school busses, using gasoline to set the road on fire while playing car chase and on and on. I probably have forgetten most of them.
7) In December of 2004 I went on an three week Indochina vacation starting off in Vietnam and later meeting a bunch of my SF friends in Thailand. We were going to do a New Year's Eve Psytrance party in Krabi, Thailand. We were going to all meet in Krabi, but then decided to first go to Koh Samui / Koh Phangan for the monthly Full Moon Party. The first full day most of us were on Koh Samui is when the big tsunami hit the India and Thailand coasts, ultimately killing more than 225,000 people in eleven countries. Krabi, where I had a beachside hotel room booked until we changed out plans, was one of the places wiped out. Koh Samui however is on the other side of the Malay peninsula and was unaffected (except for the swarms of foreign tourists rerouting there). The irony was that the Full Moon Party was a dreadfully awful Eurotrash infested experience full of drunks pissing and tossing their beer bottles in the ocean, but it was the dreadfully awful party that may have saved our lives.
8) In high school we used to get a case of beer and head down to Atlantic Beach for the night. We'd start a bonfire and sleep right on the sand in a sleeping bag. We usually did this next to an old abandoned submarine watch tower from WW II. This was a three story tall concrete tower on a raised platform. It was a little tough to climb up onto the platform, but we had it worked out. Once inside each floor was just a bare concrete room about 20x20 feet square. The floor of each room except for the bottom platform level had a big square hole in it, about 10x10. There was also a hole in each floor where the stairs used to be. They were almost entirely gone and what was left was really decrepit, but we could manage to scramble our way all the way to the top floor where you'd get pretty nice views. It was a great place to sit and drink your beer. Inevitably someone would start suggesting we jump over the 10x10 holes in the floor. Now ten feet isn't a long way to jump, but considering how often we did it and how much drinking we sometimes had engaged in, I'm still amazed to this day that none of us ever fell to our deaths. A girl from the next county did exactly that a few years after I graduated and they tore down the tower.
9) We were having a party at my place in college. It was a house everyone called The Barn because it looked like one. I lived on the second floor where the party was, and the property manager Larry lived downstairs. It was late in the night and the party was just beginning to wind down but there were still a dozen or so people there. I had retired to my room where I was busy trying to hook up with someone I had been hoping to hook up with for some time. So when I heard the first scuffle outside my door I ignored it, hoping my housemates would take care of it. A few minutes later though I hear "he's got a gun" and decide maybe I needed to investigate this. I come out of my room and I see my housemate John Ray and Larry wrestling over a shotgun. At this point I didn't know who was crazy, so I figured I would just get the gun away from both of them until we could sort it out. So the three of us are now wrestling over this shotgun. We're pulling back and forth, twisting around. We do this all the way down the hallway and down the stairs off the back deck into the backyard. When we reach the bottom I finally convince them both to let go of it. At that exact moment I'm blinded by lights as the cops come around the corner of The Barn, weapons drawn on me and yelling to drop the shotgun. Take your pick where I could have died in that one. The upside is I totally got lucky afterwards.
I'm probably forgetting a few. It's been a long life. I've been held up at knife point, thought I was going to die another time surfing, almost had my head taken off when an SRL robot called the Hand o' God spun around suddenly, been caught offshore in bad weather in a canoe...
Fortunately I take it easier these days, being a dad and all.
Finally, the Wolfram Alpha engine is able to answer one of my questions. I suppose Kurzweil is one of the few humans on its birthday calendar though.
<paul2> "The Cove" got a pretty big distribution deal from Lions Gate...should end up in quite a few theaters
<dav> that's the dolphin thing?
<paul2> yeah, it was really good, as good as any doc I've ever seen
<paul2> had a ocean's 11 vibe to it.
<paul2> got all these people that were total badasses in their field to try and get to the cove in japan
<paul2> really really messed up stuff going on there
<Jeff-S> in Japan?
<paul2> yeah
<Jeff-S> do tell
<paul2> there's town in Japan (Taiji) this is the larget supplier of dolpins used in amusement parks..
<paul2> there's a area of the town that's on dolphin migration routes..so it's east for fisherman to heard them to a bay..
<paul2> for each dolphin that's sold to a place like sea world, they get $150k per
<paul2> so the rest, porpoises, or just not the right look, they wouldn't say what happened to them...but sure enough each next day the cycle started again
<paul2> and they wouldn't let anyone monitor what's happens...so this guy gets all these people together to sneak to a cove where they believe the netted dolphins are herded..
Last night I had this great dream. I was hanging out in some weird but fancy hotel with my friend Irene and a bunch of other people. The scene seemed a bit like a dream sequence from Satoshi Kon's Paprika right on the threshold of where it gets weird. Irene (who works for Google) started showing me this new thing she'd been working on that I think she called Google Fabric of the Universe™. And then she started pointing at objects in the room and suddenly a floating overlay of scripting code would popup between us and the object and she would start manipulating it. It was a bit like the Javascript console in Firebug, except it was shimmering half opacity entire multiline blocks of code. In fact the code looked like Javascript, which I found annoying. Surely the fabric of the universe source code should be
something designed for concurrency like Erlang.
Anyhow, she started adding methods on objects and dispatching events. I guess it looked a little like Second Life except with an interactive console and hella better graphics. Tables started floating in the air, a toy fish started swimming around us. She showed me how to access the console (unfortunately I don't remember that part now) and I started experimenting. It was like being Neo from The Matrix. I was doing things like adding speech modules to the toy fish, connecting motion drivers to the callback delegates on people's shoes and making the wallpaper start to play YouTube videos. It was fun. It turned a bit darker when someone else started playing and they spawned a succubus that I spent most of the rest of the dream fending off. I made physical shields out of other objects in the room and brought in a flood and spawned a kayak to escape. Not sure what happened to Irene, but I'm sure she was OK. She works for Google.
p.s I've been hacking a lot lately, in case that wasn't obvious.
Throw away those 20th century boxers with holes in them, time for some 21st Century Space Underwear (from Japan naturally): designed to kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body, dry quickly, resist flames and do away with that pressing concern of modern fashion — static cling. They're also comfy and stylish.
Surely they'll also have the anti-skid mark, auto-tweeting and self-shaking options by the time it hits the mall.
Smell wars: Japanese astronaut testing stink-free underwear
In space, no one can hear you scream, "Change your shorts!" So, in the name of odor-free orbiting, the first Japanese astronaut to live on the International Space Station is the guinea pig for some new high-tech underwear developed at Japan Women's University, Reuters tells us.
Koichi Wakata's zero-gravity "J-ware" is designed to kill bacteria, absorb water, insulate the body, dry quickly, resist flames and do away with that pressing concern of modern fashion — static cling. They're also comfy and stylish.
"He can wear his trunks more than a week," said Koji Yanagawa, an official with the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Another Japanese astronaut gave the clothes a dry run last year during a shuttle mission. "The other astronauts become very sweaty, but he doesn't have any sweat. He didn't need to hang his clothes to dry," Yanagawa added.
The new space skivvies are likely to cut down on the amount of clothing sent to the ISS, which lacks a laundry room.
Once development is finished, the Japanese space agency plans to make the clothes available to NASA and its other space station partners. After that, look for them at your local mall.
Another one of those Facebook tagged notes things. This one from my long lost pal Jeff. Jeff, as it turns out, had a big impact on the music portion of my life, so I have to respond to this one.
I am taking the title of this literally, so these are not necessarily my favorite albums, although many of them fit that as well, but ones that had an impact on the course of my life. They are more or less in chronological order.
The Clash - Combat Rock
At age 14.5 I got a NC Work Permit and took on a part time job as a dishwasher in a local seafood restaurant. Three weeks later I cashed my first paycheck and bought a boombox and this cassette tape. I didn't really know anything about The Clash. I think I had just heard Should I Stay or Should I Go Now on the radio. But I ended up loving this whole album. It was my introduction to anarchopunk, leanings although they remained under the surface for many years afterward, as I never went for the punk uniform or hung out much in the punk scene. Know your rights!
Jethro Tull - Living in the Past
Most of my friends give a strange look when I start to exclaim my respect for Jethro Tull. Motherfuckers rock out on songs featuring a flute and 5/4 time signature! That takes talent. My HS friends Jeff and Chris had the best record collections. This was one of Jeff's. He was a huge JT fan and introduced me to a lot of music along this vein. He was also a talented musician himself on percussion anf keyboard. Anyhow, it's tough for me to nail down a particular Jethro Tull album, but I believe this one was a sort of hits compilation so it's probably a good one to go with.
Yes - Classic Yes
This one I got introduced to by Chris. It is also a hits album, but it's one I still listen to on a regular basis to this day. Just like Jethro Tull, this was a band nerd's sort of rock group. The songs were technical, dynamic and innovative. The lyrics were poetic. I would put on headphones and trip out to this years before I ever went to college and actually tried psychedelics. Yes didn't transition well to the new era but the classic stuff remains forever Classic to me.
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
I went to this concert film at a completely empty theater and spent much of the film dancing around by myself. It's still one of my favorite music related memories.
Pressure Boys- Krandlebanum Monumentus
As mentioned in a previous post, this was the first indie rock band I ever saw, and they blew me away. The album had a great cover and they were rocking the ska-punk sound years before the ska thing ever got national air play. In fact when groups like Mighty Mighty Bosstones started popping up I always thought they sucked becuase I was comparing them to the Pressure Boys. I can tell you what was missing: the punk part. I'm very bummed to have just learned I missed their reunion show last year back in NC.
Poi Dog Pondering - Wishing Like a Mountain and Thinking Like the Sea
This was the first band that zero of my friends liked but I couldn't care less. I bought every album. As far as I knew I was their only fan in North Carolina until a girlfriend got me tickets to a gig up in Chapel Hill and I discovered a packed house with some of the best crowd energy I've ever seen at a show. I sing my daughter one of their songs at bedtime often (Spending the Day in the Shirt That You Wore.
Steve Miller Band - Greatest Hits
This album mostly had an affect on my life because around 1990 I traded this CD for a futon, and I slept on that futon up until my wife made me throw it away and get a tempurpedic in 2005. Still, I'm ok with Steve Miller. I've got a live album that totally rocks.
Chemical Brothers - Exit Planet Dust
Hey check it out. Electronica doesn't have to suck! This album freed me from the guilt of enjoying electronica music even though I knew it kind of sucked. Thanks. I drove with some friends from NC to Chicago to see the Chemical Brothers and it was so damn loud that I lost hearing in one ear for 24 hours and suffered some permanent hearing loss.
DJ Z-Trip & Radar - Live at Future Primitive Sound Vol II
This album gave me a new appreciation for DJs. It starts off a little slow, but by midway it completely throws down, mixing classic rock and hiphop in a way that was fresh at its time. Exposure to this album and the subsequent following of the Future Primitive activites here in San Francisco probably had the effect of pushing my appreciation of street art to a higher level.
Nick Drake - Pink Moon
A girlfriend turned me on to him in the late 90s. I thought his music was raw, ethereal and haunting. His personal story of suffering and suicide only added to the poignancy of each song. Later his music resurfaced in public consciousness via the splash of the title track being used in a popular Volkswagen TV commercial. For several years my alarm clock was a series of three songs that played each morning; two Drake tracks: Black Eyed Dog and Northern Sky, followed by Sonic Youth's Superstar.
Whiskeytown - Faithless Street
Yeah I know Ryan Adams is apparently a total ass, but this album brought back my appreciation of good country which had been under exercised after moving to San Francisco. It didn't hurt that on first listen the song lyrics reminded me of my hometown, and eventually I found out he actually -was- from my hometown. I ended up getting back in touch with my inner redneck because of this album.
Dungen - Ta Det Lugnt
Although I guess techincally psych-rock, it brought back my early prog rock years with a vengance. After listening to this probably 20 times in a row I started putting my languishing Jethro Tull and Yes tracks back in heavy rotation. Their San Francisco show for this album tour was the best concert I went to that year. Phenomenal.
- Crash Worship @ The Brewery, Raleigh NC, early 90s; I caught a glimpse of a bacchanalian future in the leather flasks the band was passing around the audience. The show ended when the venue was so filled with smoke people had to crawl out on their knees.
- Pine State w/ Her Majesty's Secret Cervix, Renelvis, et al; Duke Coffeehouse in the 90s. There was a guy in a gimp suit on a gurney, I passed out on the couch for one band, one of the drummers for Pine State pulled a knife on someone.
- Extra Action Marching Band @ NIMBY Fight Night. They were on the stage across from the boxing ring with 3 on 3 bouts going on. My brother's punk crew and the rest of us were moshing in the middle, motorcycles were pushing through the crowd, things were literally on fire along the edges.
- Nashville Pussy et al @ Local 506, Sleazefest 1997. Nobody had more fun that weekend than I did. When Sleazefest came to visit me in California I had to spend a night in jail. It was that kind of relationship.
- Pressure Boys free concert on the Quad at ECU fall of 1987. This was my introduction to indie rock, it was love at first exposure.
- My Bloody Valentine - San Francisco 2009; I wisely wore tarmac ear protectors and it was fabulous.
- Flaming Lips @ University of London late 90s; Words fail me.
- Chemical Brothers (Aragon Ballroom in Chacago) early 90s; I was deaf in one ear for 24 hours and suffered some permanent hearing loss. It was worth it.
- Ministry @ Lollapalooza. The sun had just set, the lightshow was blinding, the air was filled with an eruption of intensity (identified flying objects).
- Hot Chip @ Coachella 2008. The Revenge of the Nerds band really rocks.
