It was 106 degrees here today in Portland. It's supposed to get to 108 tomorrow. I spent today indoors at Rael's office, with a few quick brief trips to Powell's and the 7-11 during which time I lost approximately 200 pounds of body fluids through evaporation, osmosis, and theft by tiny elves. I will spend tomorrow inside Rael's basement, playing Uno with his kids and doing a day-long impersonation of JD Salinger by not going outside, not sending mail, and ignoring the telephone. Sunday I will move to the OSCON hotel and prepare for the coming week of craziness, when I'll get little sleep, running around like a madman, but at least I won't have to be outside in his smothering sweatening hobo-baking granny-killing blood-boiling nightmare inferno of swelt.
Tell us a little something about your first girlfriend/boyfriend.
Beautiful, bookish, seventeen, and immediately discarded in favour of her perky sixteen year old sister. I was a shitbag. It wasn't even that I was a womanizing stud in my youth (or ever!). It was just that her sister was curvier and I had no practice in saying "appreciate what you've got" to my hormones. So sad, so very sad. She took it with grace, from which (with the benefit of distance) I deduce that I was no great catch at age seventeen.
What's the strongest association you have between a scent and a memory?
Right now it's the stream of diarrhea running like a river from the homeless man who was parked on the sidewalk two blocks away from Rael's office. The smell was like nothing I've smelled before, and I've had two small children who like dried fruit. It was a Niagara of effluvia, a smell that travelled with you even as you looked away, gagging, and thought "well, there's nothing I could do" while awkwardly making your middle-class excuses as you strode onward checking to make sure that smell that stuck in your nose, the smell that wouldn't go away even when the man and his predicament were blocks away, the smell that was making your psyche ache, wasn't coming from a drip of homeless shit on your clean new limited-edition Puma sneakers.
I agree strongly with David agreeing with Mena (that last post is friends-only) about privacy being essential around kids. I'm a laid-back guy who doesn't like formalities and who is naturally distrustful of extreme emotion whether adoration or paranoia. I didn't used to believe those who were concerned about kid privacy, until Jenine did an artsy photo shoot with our kids. Black and white film, white sheet, light spilling in through the window, chubby kids ... naked. Not porn, just the occasional cute baby buttcheek.
Naked was the problem. We keep our family photos in Gallery, which helpfully shows how many times each picture has been viewed. The art photos had >100 views, compared to the 7 to 10 for the hundreds of other photos we took that month of the kids fully dressed at the playground, friends' houses, and riding their bikes. Only possible explanation: preverts. And that was enough to creep me out.
