Colin Campbell, Copywriter

colin@colin.org      408-370-6521

            On September 21, 2013, I received this email:

From: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>

Subject: ?

Looking for me?

 

     I wasn’t sure what was going on at first. I assumed it was spam coincidentally using “Rhonda” as a name.  I had an ex-wife named Rhonda but I hadn’t heard from her or about her for 34 years. Although I thought about her occasionally over the years I hadn’t been looking for her. I’d googled her a few times but according to Google she did not exist.

     So I was cautious. I googled the email address and discovered it belonged to Rhonda N. Morley, age 66, 20525 Highway 195, Spangle, WA 99031

Rhonda’s middle name is Nadine.  The age was right. So I decided it had to be her.

—————————————————

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>

You’re a hard girl to find.

 

From: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>

3 more married names and an official change to my mother’s maiden name didn’t help, I’m sure.  Well, now you’ve found me.  I’ve been a widow for almost 12 years and just kept my last married name.

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>

I am one of the easier Colin Campbells to find on the Web.

 

From:   Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>

I suppose I would be more accessible if I joined Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, etc., but the thought of putting all that personal information in public just makes my teeth itch.

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>

I put tons of personal information about myself on my own site, but I don’t like the idea of Facebook owning everything I post. So I hardly ever post anything on Facebook.  I’m not that kind of a megalomaniac.  They say 15% of Web traffic is cat videos…this is my cat Nuke. Born on August 6.

 

 

From:    Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>

Can’t send you any pictures via e-mail–I’m still using my trusty 35mm.  My cat is named Merry (she was a rescue named “Purrsy” so I gave her a name close in sound) She turned 17 in August.  I have had her for 9 of her years.  I also have a 9-year old Chihuahua mix named Jesse, rescued at the age of six. He weighs 6 pounds, half of what Merry weighs.  Your Nuke is very handsome.

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>

So, what’s up? Why did you ask if I were looking for you?

 

From: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>

My brother and I were talking about security issues, etc., and he suggested I google my own name.  I  had done that several times, but never my full name.  When I put in my full name, I came up with a posting from you giving the date we married and a statement that “This is the only picture of her that I have.”  That sounded like a search to me, so I replied to you.  I was able to pull up the picture this morning–was I really ever that young??  That must have been a picture that Scott took–I don’t recall seeing it before.  If you weren’t looking for me, guess my e-mail came as a shock!

 

—————————————————

I was still being cautious, because who knows what’s going on these days on the Web. I couldn’t think of any scam that this could be. And then when she said it was a picture that Scott took, that clinched the deal, because there’s only three people in the world who know who took this picture. Me, and Scott, and Rhonda.

http://colin.org/Photos/Earlier/1970s/1972/1972Photos.html

 

So it was clear that it was actually Rhonda.

—————————————————

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>

Quite a shock. Sounds like you landed on one of my photo pages. Instead of Facebook, I put all my photos on a site I wrote myself. I’m a Web geek these days.

Here’s a picture of me and Jerry Cartwright a year before you started working at Sears.

 

 

http://colin.org/Photos/Earlier/1960s/1967/SearsPals.html

 

 

From:             Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>          

Wow, that picture brings back memories.  Actually I landed on Yasni, a site I’d never heard of–I didn’t get to my picture from that site, but eventually the next day got to your photo pages.  If you didn’t want to hear from me, I apologize.  At this stage of our lives, I wish you nothing but well.  It appears that you ARE doing well in your “Web geek” incarnation.  I scanned your reading list, and found that we are both fans of Lee Child.  Again, I’m sorry if this is unwanted communication.  Let me know, please.

 

From:             Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>          

I forgot to mention: Jerry Cartwright passed away sometime before Christmas 2009.  Barb called me on Christmas day that year and told me.  I was right in the middle of chemotherapy for breast cancer and just did not want any company (no hair, no appetite, 118 pounds)  She couldn’t understand that, and has never contacted me since.  Perhaps you knew already, but I thought I should pass along the news, however bad.

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>

I’m pleased to be in communication with you. It’s been a long time. June 1979, Karen Schumacher’s high school graduation party at Kay’s “Dancing Fern” shop in Lake Orion.

 

Sorry to hear about Jerry, but at this point I’m surprised when I find out people are still alive. I hope your chemo was successful. I haven’t had any cancer troubles–I have a theory that breaking a bone every few years keeps your immune system ready for action. Or at least that’s how I look at the positive side of my last dozen broken bones. Softball injuries.

 

My family line usually succumbs to cardiovascular rot. I’ve suffered some kind of mini-stroke that has left the right-hand side of my body unable to detect temperatures. After three years I’ve sorta gotten used to it, but it doesn’t hinder my life in the least. I’m fairly fit and I attribute it to being a daily bicycler for 30 years.

 

Years ago I decided to slam the door on  my previous life. I didn’t accomplish a thing in my 20s and so I decided to pretend those years did not exist and tried to start over as a new person. I had a strongly imprintive time working at Santa Barbara Magazine and still have strong ties to people I met then. When Kay Schumacher died I did not return phone calls from the grieving children.

 

I’m an isolated geek these days–all my friends are on-line. I’m surviving from project to project–this month I’m working at a company that manufactures Stud Finders,  home improvement tools so you can securely mount your big TV to the wall. They’re bringing out new versions of their tools re-packaged under house brand names for Home Depot and for Lowes.  I’m creating new packaging and instructions for the tools. All I’m really doing is replacing the photos of the product in the existing packaging. I became mesmerized by Macintosh graphics in 1987,  moved to San Francisco Bay Area in 1994 and freelanced as a Photoshop expert. Started writing for the Web in 1999 doing the same donkey work as at Sears: product descriptions.

 

Anyway, I welcome any communications from you. Life with you was highly imprintive, too, and I can only look with rue at my own actions. And there’s nobody else who was there except for me and you.

 

 

September 22, 2013:

From:             Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>          

It’s good that you were aware enough and smart enough to “slam the door” on your previous life.  I had the door slammed for me in 1983.  A psychiatrist diagnosed me with severe bipolar syndrome and prescribed lithium for me.  A definite door slammer:  it was like going from treading water in the middle of the ocean to having a place to stand.  Within a few months, I had quit drinking and quit having outbursts of rage and periods of black depression.  I also got the job I would keep for the next 22 years: collecting child support for the state of Washington.

 

You may be right about the immune-boosting effect of broken bones.  I had my first bout with cancer–ovarian–in 1984.  People talk about the biological clock ticking away–in my case it was attached to a bomb…..In 1987 I moved from Seattle to the Spokane area (Spangle, 13 miles due south of Spokane.) No one at work could understand why I would take a step backward as far as promotion availability, but it wasn’t about that.  I can still go to the local post office and NEVER stand in line.  Things like that matter to me.

 

In 2003 I was diagnosed with systemic lupus, and the first organ affected was my brain.  I had to retire in 2005 because of my inability to read a document and retain the contents, and other short-term memory deficits.  I do OK with it, because I have to.  I still read voraciously, and if I’m having a memory problem when I read a book, that just means I can read it again and enjoy it twice!

 

I’m pretty isolated, too.  I learned long ago to enjoy my own company, and to depend on myself for most everything.  If I may use your word, life with you was highly imprintive, and I have cause to regret some of my actions, too.  Perhaps we should give ourselves a break–we WERE young (and one of us was crazy……)

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
To: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>
Cc: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Sun, Sep 22, 2013 4:32 pm
Subject: Re: ?

22 years in one job, cripes. I’ve had exactly one regular job since the last time I saw you, and that lasted only four months. A small-time ad agency in Santa Barbara. Other than that, everything I’ve done has been on a freelance/contract basis. Self-employment. I like being my own boss, but I hate being the employee who has to do all the work.

 

Collecting child support…that was part of the reason I slammed the door on my past. In 1975 I was hanging out at Hosmer’s Bar and one of the regulars I talked to every night, Jerry, vanished. We all wondered what happened to him and then a week later he showed up. He was all pissed about being in jail for a week because of unpaid child support for his three children in Minnesota. He thought he’d evaded that shit. He ranted at length about what a bitch his ex-wife was but I was thinking about his kids. I’d never known he even had kids. My father never missed a child support payment, and it wasn’t his fault that my mother used the money to keep her biker boyfriends in beer instead of buying shoes for me and my sibs. 

 

It really set me to thinking…this guy Jerry was just about my best friend, and this is the kind of guy he is? What am I devolving into?  

 

Then I got a phone call from Marilyn Davey. She’d been Tommy Parshall’s girlfriend, and after he moved to New Jersey she and I started hanging out. I helped her move to Hillsdale, Michigan, where she and her two kids could be close to her sister. I visited her in Hillsdale several times, and the last time, we were sitting down to dinner and there was a knock at the door and there was some kid selling bootleg 8-track tapes door to door.  She talked to the kid for a few minutes and then said, “Colin, I’d like for you to leave. I want to fuck this kid.”  I left and never saw her again. 

 

So the phone call caught me by surprise.  She told me all kinds of sweet things about me, how she was now realizing what a fine guy I was, and by the way she’d been in a drunken car wreck and was now a paraplegic and she wanted me to help her. 

 

I hung up on her. She kept calling and pestering me.  Kay and Ed kept telling me I owed it to Marilyn to devote the rest of my life to catering to her wheelchair needs. 

 

So I solved it by running away and slamming the door on those people, that life. I took my one duffel bag of possessions and just got on the bus, Gus, a Greyhound to Santa Barbara, where Scott had a job as Art Director at Santa Barbara Magazine. Although I didn’t know it, he’d assured people at the magazine that  I was a genius and they believed him and accepted me onto the staff. 

 

I was still wracked with depression. I went to a free clinic with chest palpitations and the guy examined me and sighed and said “How many valium do you want?” He was ready to write a prescription for as much as I wanted. I decided I already had enough addictions and instead quit smoking on my 30th birthday. I’m a rare bird, I quit only once in my life.

 

I read that exercise soothes depression so I began bicycling. I’ve now pedaled enough miles to go around the Earth three times. Bicycling has added to my bone collection: a broken nose, a broken rib, and a broken femoral neck of  my right femur. Also known as a broken hip. But I healed fast from that (I have three titanium lag bolts in my hip) and although I missed the 1994 and 1995 softball seasons I came back the next year and kept playing until 2010. I can’t throw the ball straight any more. 

 

My siblings are still alive except for Lanie, who died at 49 during elective surgery.  She had lupus, too, except that then she claimed it merged over into multiple sclerosis. She was a doctor addict. 

 

My father suffered a fatal stroke five years ago today, on his 86th birthday. He was still quite active; he designed two new typefaces in his final year, and did 12 oil paintings, and was designing a new logo for the Susan G. Komen For The Cure Foundation on the day he died. 

 

I never had any rapprochement with my mother. She came to Santa Barbara in 1985 for my sister Mary’s wedding and visited me at my apartment for two hours and smoked one full pack of cigarets and told me about every dog she’d owned since I left the family farm in 1966. She had no interest in anything I’d done with my life. 

 

In 2002 I drove across the country to Michigan, Florida, and Oklahoma to visit elderly relatives for the final time, and i stopped at Ma’s trailer trash hovel in Mannford, OK, and spent two days. She was on her last legs and was not able to understand much. Her husband Pete Antonian had his head cut off in a traffic wreck in 1998.

 

She died a week after my visit and I didn’t go to the funeral. She was 76. 

 

I haven’t had much romance in my life. Maybe if you hate your mother you can never know love. I had a six-year relationship with Linda, an art history/French teacher at a Santa Barbara high school, but she didn’t like what I did for a living.  Ever since my days at BBDO Detroit I’ve been writing about 10 pages a day in my journal, and Linda couldn’t stand it that I might be writing about her.  She presented me with an ultimatum: change one letter in my job description, or we were through. From “writer” to “waiter.”  

 

It wasn’t out of the blue, she’d been withdrawing from me for months, but it still astonished me. And I never saw her again.  I was so enraged. I spent two years pedaling furiously and composing mental screeds against her, and then one day I looked up and noticed that I was completely invisible to girls. Just a little after my 40th birthday.  And I decided that I’d only wreaked destruction on the women in my life and I set it all aside and have never been in another relationship. 

 

By that time I was active in the BBS, the bulletin-board system that preceded the Internet.  One of the other BBSers remarked that “Colin married his Macintosh,” and I guess it was true. I started what might have been the very first on-line magazine in 1989 and published a dozen science fiction stories there over the years. Parts in the middle of my story “Old Al” have similarities to our life in 1972 in Orange County, but it’s not about us at all. Oh, and I used an Ed Siever story in Old Al…the scene about drowning a chipmunk in beer. 

 

My stories are all at my site, http://colin.org/Fiction/Fiction.html

 

I’ve never made a nickel from my stories. About a hundred thousand people have read my story “The Girl Of The Month Club,” and a guy called me a couple years ago to ask permission to make a video version of it, but so far that’s the last I’ve heard of it. Right now I’m writing a novel about trailer trash in the 23rd century. Who knows if I’ll ever finish it. 

 

 

On Sep 27, 2013, at 9:25 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:



I wrote a 3-paragraph reply to this e-mail and thought I sent it out.  I checked today to see if I had said something to make you stop writing, and I could  not find the e-mail in my “Sent” file.  So I looked in “Trash” and there it was, attached to your e-mail and never sent.  So I transferred it to my inbox so I could send it, and it is somewhere in the ether between Trash and IN.  I have an idiot-savant relationship with my computer–guess which one of us is the idiot………

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
To: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>
Cc: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Fri, Sep 27, 2013 9:40 am
Subject: Great idiot savants think alike

I thought it was something I said that made you stop writing.

 

On Sep 27, 2013, at 6:39 PM, Rhonda wrote:



No.  If I should decide to stop writing, I would tell you.  I’m not really into games–maturity, I guess.

 

 

 

From: msrnmorley <msrnmorley@aol.com>
To: colin <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Sun, Sep 22, 2013 8:14 pm
Subject: Re: ?

Yep, 22 years.  I’d just be retiring this year if I hadn’t had extreme brain fade.  It was severe enough that I received Social Security Disability.  It did a number on my self-esteem for awhile.  The next worst symptom is fatigue, and that’s around all the time.  I never heard of lupus kind of sashaying into MS, but there are lots of things I’ve never heard of.  Lupus is bad enough.

 

Dennis was hired by Boeing and we left Michigan in January of 1980–I think.  I don’t know why I was dumb enough to think he’d leave his philandering behind–he didn’t and we were divorced in 1981.  I remarried–too quickly–to Bob Kristofferson.  He did 2 nice things for me while we were married:  he took me and picked me up from all my chemo treatments in 1984-85, and he left me in June of 1989.

I came home from work one day and he was gone, leaving me a note telling me he had closed (and emptied, of course) all the bank accounts.  Turns out he had a couple honeys on the side, too.

 

After my divorce was final in 1990, I was really vocal about not needing a man in my life, etc., etc.  I’m sure people got tired of hearing it.  I even went to court and changed my last name to Stallard (my mother’s maiden name) so that I would have nothing left of Bob–not even his name.  

 

Richard and I were married in 1996, 2 months before my mother passed away.  It was a good marriage.  He died in November of 2001 of a heart attack.  When I showed up in March of 1996 with an engagement ring–let’s just say I know what words taste like….

 

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
To: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>
Cc: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Sat, Sep 28, 2013 12:41 pm
Subject: Re: Great idiot savants think alike

Rhonda, 

 

After all these years of wondering whatever happened to Rhonda, I’m now feeling like the dog that chased cars and then caught one: now what? 

 

I made pretensions of being a writer when we were together, but I hardly ever really wrote anything. After I slammed the door on my life, I began actually writing. In 1979 I was able to buy a brand new IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter with my salary as a copywriter on the Dodge account at BBDO Detroit, and it further galvanized me into writing more. I wrote about ten million words with it and then switched to a computer in 1982. An early adopter. 

 

I heard vague rumors about you and constructed a conjectural view…I heard you were working as a skip tracer, which turns out to be fairly accurate, but in my mind you were a bounty hunter, a hard-ass biker babe tracking them down and making them pay. A freelancer.  Just my own projection.

 

All I do is write, these days, and my whole career as a writer has happened subsequent to our split. My impulse is to say, look at all this stuff I did! And it’s just about me, and I don’t know if you’re interested in hearing me blab about stuff from the old days. The Copernican theory of Colin, in which everything revolves around me. 

 

I wrote a few thousand pages about you and me, trying to figure out what happened and what I should do next. I developed a method of writing down my options and plans and then analyzing the situation and finding the right path to take, and that helped me in my chaotic freelance career. I tried to write about us in fiction, but it came out stale and stilted. 

 

I have this paper trail of my life, a journal averaging ten typed pages a day since I bought that Selectric, 35 Banker’s Boxes each full of one year of my diary.  A hundred thousand pages of useless blab that nobody else has ever seen. I can go to any date and find out exactly what I was doing that day. I call it my mechanical memory. 

 

Or my lithium. I discovered that by talking out my problems on the typewriter I could diffuse them. Talk therapy with the keyboard as the only listener. I was stubborn about doing things my own way and I never sought professional psychotherapy.  Despite the urging of my father. 

 

These days I look back and see my evolution as a person, except the undocumented days with you. I don’t know what the heck I was thinking.  All I know is what we did. 

 

 

On Sep 29, 2013, at 10:41 AM, Rhonda wrote:



Colin:

 

I get it–about the dog chasing cars.  But you and I are both Border collies (even though one of us has a memory purchased at K-Mart) so I’m sure we can figure it out.  How’s that for mixing metaphors….

I wish my memories were as accessible as your journals make yours.  Some are very clear, and some are just gone.  I was talking to Jim (my brother) yesterday and told him I was going to attempt to make a gluten-free pizza today.  He asked me if I remembered the time he and I made a pizza from a mix (he even remembered the brand–Appian Way!!) and I had no recollection of it.  Not even a wisp of memory.  Sigh…

I liked your conjecture of me as a bounty hunter–sounds like Dog Chapman and his rowdy family.

I thought I was going to wind up in “talk therapy” in 1983, but after a couple of sessions and complete blood tests, the psychiatrist told me that I had such a clear-cut chemical imbalance that he didn’t think anything would help as much as lithium.  He compared me to a diabetic trying to talk his way out of a need for insulin.  I took lithium for 30 years, until my kidneys began to show some ill effects. So since last December, I have been on a half dose of lithium and a small dose of Seroquel, an anti-psychotic.  So far, so good.

 

I read “Old Al” and the interview with Rin Tin Tin.  I liked Old Al, and I thought the Rinty piece was very clever.  I intended to read “The Girl of the Month Club” before I answered you, but I can’t sit for hours.  I intend to read that later today.

 

I’m not sure what I was thinking back then either.  What I do recognize is that I was very immature and somewhat damaged by the abusive situation with my stepfather.  I did not shed a tear when he died, except that I felt sorry for Jim.  Although…..he wasn’t exactly overcome with grief, either.

 

I just printed this, and it came out in about 6 point type with double spaces between paragraphs!  It looks normal on the screen, so I hope it comes through OK.  My computer gremlin is playing….

 

Rhonda

 

 

 

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
To: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>
Cc: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Sun, Sep 29, 2013 12:51 pm
Subject: Re: Great idiot savants think alike

 

 

The Rin Tin Tin interview is unique among all my writings. For one thing, I sold it! I got $20 and it appeared as the cover story in the Santa Barbara News & Review, a weekly tabloid. I wrote it before I got my Correcting Selectric…I’ve always been a terrible typist, but it’s masked by the Corrector function and (today) the handy-dandy backspace. But my first draft of Rinty has zero typographical errors. (The online version has several errors introduced by the News & Review, but I’ve never bothered to fix them.) 

 

I’d been working on a sci-fi story about cloning dog brains as controls for cars, but it was just too icky. Somebody had loaned me a coffee-table book about the silent-movie era in Hollywood, and there was a chapter about dog stars. I was in my office at 2 in the morning drinking tequila, which I hated, but there had been a 1.5-liter jug of the cheapest tequila left over at the Santa Barbara Magazine anniversary party and I’d filched it and stored it in my desk. I was too broke to buy bourbon. 

 

So I ripped the latest worthless sheet of the dog- brain story out of the typer and threw it in the trash, and then it was like somebody was whispering in my ear and I was just writing it down, no typos, straight through for the entire interview. 

 

I subsequently tried drinking tequila again as a story lubricant but nothing like that has ever happened again.

 

About a hundred people read the Rinty interview every month. I guess it’s linked on Rin-Tin-Tin sites, although I’ve never looked to see. I got an email once from a woman who claimed to be the owner of the copyright to Rin Tin Tin and she was angry about all the inaccuracies in my interview. “Lady, that’s what the dog told me,” I replied. 

 

I don’t remember what the abusive situation was with your stepfather. I never ever saw my stepfather again, but his abuse of my sibs continued for many years after I left although I didn’t hear about it until recently. I did not go to his funeral, and neither did any of his blood relatives. Well, one of his sisters had an excuse: she’d recently escaped from jail and was on the lam and the cops would be looking for her if she attended a funeral. 

 

I tried to ask my father about events of my early life. He described an ongoing battle against my mother’s promiscuity. He knocked a front tooth out of a neighbor guy over it. He struck my mother once and that was it, he was ostracized by her family and his, and after the divorce he lived a subterranean life undergoing Freudian therapy until he met his second wife. 

 

I asked him what I was like as a little kid. He was silent a long time, and then said, “Col, you were a problem.” I asked him what things were like for our family when I was born, and he turned out not to remember a single thing about the day his firstborn arrived, nothing personal, he also remembered nothing about the gestation and birth of any of my sibs. 

 

He still had vivid recall of his World War II military career.  I guess he just successfully slammed the door on his previous life, too. Or maybe he was just old and forgetful.

 

What has Jim done with his life? I always remember the disastrous visit in California when your mother grounded him just because somebody got murdered upstairs. And didn’t the engine fall off her airplane on the way home? 

 

 

On Sep 29, 2013, at 10:41 AM, Rhonda wrote:



I wish my memories were as accessible as your journals make yours.  Some are very clear, and some are just gone.  I was talking to Jim (my brother) yesterday and told him I was going to attempt to make a gluten-free pizza today.  He asked me if I remembered the time he and I made a pizza from a mix (he even remembered the brand–Appian Way!!) and I had no recollection of it.  Not even a wisp of memory.  Sigh…

 

 

 

 

On Sep 29, 2013, at 5:44 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

It’s entirely normal for sibs to remember different things. Each of my sibs remembers incidents with me that I can’t recall, and I recall incidents with them that they scratch their heads in puzzlement about because they don’t remember. 

 

It happens even with my memory-box of journals. For instance…I’m still active in the remnants of the ancient Santa Barbara  BBS system…even though we’ve scattered to the winds, we still post messages in the ancient software format from 1989. I mentioned something there about my daily journal, and he said, oh yeah, well what were you doing on the day I was born?  And he gave me the date in September of 1981.  (Most of the other BBSers are way younger than me.)

 

So I looked it up, and it turned out that it was a Friday and Linda was pining and grumpy because she’d heard about a fancy socialite party in the posh zone of Montecito, and she really wanted to go but she wasn’t invited. So I invented a plan and we crashed the party. Linda had a 35mm camera and a box of high-end lenses, left over from her marriage to a dissolute heir and never used,  and I took the lenses with us and we went to the party and at the door I spun a story about the official party photographer calling me and asking me to deliver these lenses that he forgot, and we got in. 

 

That’s what my journal reports, anyway, but I have absolutely no memory of the event.  And I don’t have lupus to blame it on. The past is just too big for one brain to contain it all.

 

 

On Sep 30, 2013, at 8:11 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Colin:  I had to go in for a fasting blood test today.  The blood draw doesn’t bother me, but the fasting just knocks me flat for a day or more.  I’m sure I’ll feel more human in the morning and will answer your e-mail then.

 

 

On Oct 1, 2013, at 9:36 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Well, I feel a little less like roadkill this morning.  More importantly, my brain is operating again.  What about cloning snake brains for cars–perhaps that would enable one to slither through rush-hour traffic….All joking aside, have you seen the latest Popular Science magazine?  There is a long article about cars that, to some extent, drive themselves.  Pretty creepy, in ways.

 

Jim is doing well.  He married his church/high school sweetheart in the 70s and had 2 daughters with her.  In the 80s, he had a son with a girlfriend, got divorced, then had a daughter with the same girlfriend.  He got sidetracked into a 1% motorcycle club in the 1980s.  I don’t know a whole lot about his life then.  But he met his current wife, Jennifer, sometime in the 80s (that was a busy decade for him) and they married in 1990.  He worked for the same company as his dad–DeVlieg Machine Co–for quite awhile, then went to work for Delphi Machinery.  Then his job was eliminated when the auto companies hit the skids a few years ago.  He’s a journeyman electrician, so I wouldn’t have thought he would have such a hard time finding a job.  But he did, and now he and Jennifer are living in Lexington, KY, which is where he finally found a job.  Like your dad, he paid all of his child support for all 4 kids until they all turned 18.  Jennifer has a daughter also, who has a daughter.  Jim has 2 grandkids on his side.  They don’t see any of them, as far as I know, kids or grandkids.

 

I never told you about the abuse situation with my stepfather.  I never told anyone.  I always thought it was my fault.  I finally worked through it all on my own after Bob (3rd husband) left.  I realized I had gravitated to someone who was very like my stepfather.  About 6 weeks after he left it dawned on me that he had really done me a favor, and I was able to put aside the guilt from several sources that I never should have felt in the first place.

 

I asked my mother once what I was like as a small child.  She looked at me long and steady and said “I knew you were different from other children.”  She went on to tell me that at 8-9 months, most children will hold their arms out to adults they know.  I not only would not reach for people, I would frown and turn away.  People worried because I was a rather silent child, and because I had imaginary playmates.  I remember them more vividly than I recall most of my flesh-and-blood childhood companions.  With the exception of one aunt (now deceased) and two cousins with whom I maintain contact, most of the family never got over thinking I was a little strange.

 

 

 

On Oct 1, 2013, at 2:45 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’m pensive, thinking about poor little Rhonda abused by her stepfather and never ever telling anybody about it. I don’t recall withholding anything from you, or keeping anything about my past secret. I’ve always been open about my life. My Website lays my life out there for view.

 

     I grew up feeling privileged because there was no corporeal punishment in my house. Other kids in the neighborhood couldn’t believe it. “You mean you never get whipped?” Nope, not ever. The typical dad in that neighborhood got home from the factory in the evening and began slugging down the beers and selecting a child to beat because he knew they probably did something wrong today even if he hadn’t been there to witness it. Sometimes to their great relief he’d pass out drunk before actually conducting the whipping. 

 

     Ma didn’t whip us and she didn’t allow her boyfriends to whip us. What I didn’t understand at the time was that neglect was a form of abuse. We were feral children sharing a house with a woman who had first dibs on our support money. We learned to live invisible lives in order to stay out of her view. The only function of a child in the household was to be a beer-fetcher. 

 

     After I left, and then after Scott left, the stepfather became overtly abusive with my sisters, I discovered just a couple years ago. My sister Lanie followed the trend: she had two daughters and then when the girls were about the age when our father left the family, Lanie abandoned them and ran off to be the girlfriend of a high-living bail bondsman in Tucson. The daughters were shuffled off into the care of a molesting grandfather. Two decades later, the two daughters exactly duplicated Lanie’s feat, birthing and abandoning two girl babies apiece. 

 

     Lanie’s bail bondsman changed her in for a younger model after about ten years and the next thing you know she got knocked up by a carpenter at the atomic testing grounds in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Richard, a guy fifteen or twenty years older than her. Their life together was such bliss that one day Richard came home from work early and put a 1/2-inch drill bit down the barrel of his shotgun and then put the shotgun to his chest and pulled the trigger. Their son discovered the body when he got home from school, sixth grade I think. 

 

     After Lanie died, Scott was the executor of the will and found a $35,000 educational trust fund for the boy set up by a valid life insurance policy of Richard’s. But when he inquired further he found out that the fund had been drained somehow. The money was gone. Scott hired some investigators who found out that Lanie had used elaborate and devious techniques to sidestep all the protections and get at the money. She’d drained the account years ago and knew the audit schedule; once previously she had replaced the $35,000 in the account just before the audit, and then removed it again. 

 

     So it turned out that her death due to risky elective surgery was actually a suicide: Scott’s investigation revealed that her shenanigans were about to be rewarded with an arrest on a Federal wire fraud charge. Scott successfully sued the financial institution for lack of due diligence and the education fund was restored. When the kid became of age he spent it on an automotive tech school and he’s now a master mechanic at your friendly neighborhood BMW dealer. 

 

     Scott spent his career as an art director in the Detroit ad biz. He eventually came to grips with the fact that the job would not allow him to use his true creative talents so he put his job on auto-pilot and devoted his real energies to becoming a fine finished carpenter and interior remodeler. Scott and Mary Jane divorced in 1981, she was always running off with other guys…she was indignant about it when she was arrested for prostitution one night. The cops said, “Look, lady, if you ain’t a hooker, you shouldn’t come to a place like this, dressed like that, and hang out at the bar.” All charges were dropped. 

 

     She vanished for months one time to hang out with some guy in Hollywood. Then when Scott had some bar girl over for the evening, Mary Jane showed up and began throwing furniture through closed windows and the cops came and she got into a struggle with a cop and they both fell down the stairs, and it looked like some severe charges were possible, but it all got misdemeanored down. 

 

     Or that’s the story as I heard it–I was not around. Scott re-married: a girl from Taiwan who was a waitress at a favorite Chinese restaurant among the adbiz crowd. Scott learned to speak Chinese and they seemed like a fine couple until the day her American citizenship vested, ten years to the day after they married. She filed for divorce and charged that he kept her as a sex slave. He had two large lavish homes in Birmingham that he’d remodeled as his great works of art, and she got one of them. Scott hired a private investigator who found 16 bank accounts that Hua-Jin had set up outside of Scott’s knowledge and he was able to get them included in the community property settlement.


     Scott spent the next 15 years without talking to any of us, or anybody else. A complete recluse. But now he’s back to a semblance of normality, married again and mostly retired.

 

     I’ve remained close with my brother Matt, who married the boss’s daughter at the car parts shop. He owned his own car repair shop in Santa Barbara but couldn’t make a profit at it and, in a big turnaround, changed to making robots for a company in the chip industry, a kind of job where you’re supposed to have a mechanical engineering degree, even though he remains a high school dropout to this day. His wife Nancy kept the books for her father’s car parts business and she took a seasonal job at H&R Block and after a few years opened her own tax preparation company and is now an Enrolled Agent and earned enough money so that she and Matt were able to buy a house in Santa Barbara. They have two sons, Lucas (born a few months after the first Star Wars movie came out) and Ian. Luke has settled into a life of a delivery man for the photocopier company with all the government contracts in the Santa Barbara area, with beer and video games as the other half of his life, while Ian has more of the Campbell verve and is returning to school for a master’s degree in electrical engineering after two years in a tech job. He’s also a highly skilled musician, front man for a rock band, who builds his own guitars and silk-screens amusing t-shirts into existence. 

 

     I have no idea what I was like as a child. Nobody left to ask, either. It’s a closed book. Two years ago I went to Detroit for the funeral of my Aunt Grace, last survivor among my ancestry, and I saw cousins I hadn’t seen for fifty years. I discovered that an extended-family decree had been issued when my mother married Pete Antonian: by that act, she severed all communications with her family. My cousins were no longer allowed to have any contact with us. 

 

     This explained a lot. 

 

     But, to this day I have no information as to whether my family thought I was strange, or thinks I’m strange. I have zero input from anybody on such matters. I can talk to Matt about it, but it turns out he was kept packed in barbiturates throughout his childhood and he doesn’t remember a thing about it. 

 

     I never had imaginary playmates. I had an imaginary wolf that lived under my bed and had to be placated with a plate of treats under the bed or it would climb out and kill me and eat me in my sleep, but that was when I was 4. After that my childhood companions were books, so only the characters were imaginary. The books were real. 

 

 

On Oct 2, 2013, at 3:32 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Let me assure you that “poor little Rhonda” died more than 30 years ago.  I poisoned her with lithium to make room for a rational adult.

 

 


On Oct 3, 2013, at 8:30 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I don’t know what the  psychiatric diagnosis of  poor little Colin would have been. Narcissistic paranoiac with delusions of grandeur, perhaps. Sociopath, probably. 

 

I didn’t poison him. Self-medicated with booze and dope, yes, but I think I’m still pretty much the same guy I always was, although quite subdued now by my erratic economic life.  I was overly influenced by Travis McGee and I took my retirement in installments while I was young enough to enjoy it. 

 

I’m not really a fan of the Jack Reacher books. In Santa Barbara last Christmastime I had lunch with a guy I’d never met before, although I’ve known him for twenty years in the on-line, and we yakked about detective novels and he touted me onto Lee Child. So I read five or six of them and probably won’t try any more. Too fantasmagorical for my taste. I read them with interest and admired the way the author handled things…I can’t think of any other series character who has had his tales told in both first person and third person. 

 

But, I don’t really read fiction any more. Who knows why. It’s not unusual for people to switch away from fiction, they tell me. Young people have no idea what life is about and they read fiction to find out what is possible, and later they’re too busy living to read any fiction. 

 

These days I’m on a binge of books about the history of technology back down to the first stone tools, and how technological advancements paced alongside of human evolution, and how the human body adapted to the easy living of technology. I don’t read quite as many books these days because I’m reading so much on the Web. 

 

“Study as though you’re going to live forever,” Heinlein told me. Maybe reading was the way I insulated myself against my chaotic childhood. I became addicted to it and haven’t been able to quit. Apparently my great goal in life was to be able to sit around and read all day. I don’t know if that’s a rational way for an adult to act.  

 

 


On Oct 7, 2013, at 8:12 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I have not been a really rational person for the past few days.  I have been nursing an injured ankle, and I have no patience with sitting around with an ice pack/heating pad.  I was wheeling a full (maybe 45#) garbage can down the driveway, pulling it behind me, and I let it slip out of my left hand.  It has a hard plastic stationary handle, and that crashed down on my left Achilles tendon, which was extended at the time.  It hurt like bloody hell.  Today I put on some compression socks and tennis shoes and went grocery shopping, and it swelled up a bit more, but at least I got out of the recliner and out of the house!

I still pull out a Travis McGee book now and then, and not long ago I re-read the Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything.  I think I have read all the Jack Reacher books and have the new one on my Amazon wish list.  I like Jack Reacher because he’s bigger than life, and I also really like the way Lee Child writes.  He says something in one of his books about the questions asked of a 12-gauge shotgun are answered at the first use (but of course he said it better and I can’t remember the book.)

 

 

On Oct 9, 2013, at 8:24 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I crashed my bicycle last winter and landed on my right elbow and got a bone bruise that took three months to go away.  Plus road rash on both knees, but I was barely hobbled for a couple days. Ankles are way worse. 

 

Do you have any photos of us? All of my photos were in a filing cabinet, and one day in 1975 I moved to a new apartment in Royal Oak, and it took several carloads of moving stuff, and the filing cabinet was the biggest thing in the final load. I stopped at Hosmer’s Bar for a couple of drinks and when I came back out, the filing cabinet was gone. Who would steal a battered old filing cabinet? Everything I’d ever written, every document and certificate, was in it. 

 

When I drove across the country in 2002 visiting decrepit old relatives, I brought a scanner and my laptop and elbowed my way into their photo collections and scanned them to put on my site. Scott had the photo of you that’s now on my site, as you guessed. 

 

I read the Jack Reacher stories with an eye to stealing Lee Child’s technique. Among the recent elegies about Elmore Leonard’s passing was a list of his “Ten Rules for Writing,” and one that Child really uses is “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.” 

 

But basically I do not read fiction any more. What’s an unemployed bum doing sitting around reading? Get out there and look for work! Or at least study something that might be useful. 

 

 

 

On Oct 12, 2013, at 5:06 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I don’t have any photos of us.  When I organized my pictures a couple of years ago, I was struck by the dearth of pictures before 1990.  Actually, I had some from the ’80s, but they were mostly of my pets.  My photos run about 90% pets and 10% people.  Pet photos are much more fulfilling to me.  Come to think of it, pets are much more fulfilling than people in general.  

 

I apologize for the delay in replying.  Sometimes I go for days without checking my e-mail.  Not because I’m not interested, but because I have several medical issues to deal with on a daily basis.  Remembering your lack of empathy for other peoples’ medical problems (unless of course they’re broken bones) I won’t bore you with the details.

 

As far as the theft of your filing cabinet, I have a theory.  There are people who put a higher value on stolen items than on things they have acquired legally.  I think they have an exaggerated sense of the skills required to steal, and that invests the stolen items with way more than their intrinsic worth. 

 

I still read fiction and enjoy every minute.  Besides Lee Child, I am fond of J. A. Jance, Sue Grafton, Anne and Todd McCaffrey, among others.  I also subscribe to several magazines:  Readers Digest, Dog Fancy, Guideposts, Popular Science, Consumer Reports, and I generally read all of them cover-to-cover. 

 

 

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
To: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>
Cc: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Fri, Oct 18, 2013 12:44 pm
Subject: From reckless youth to old recluse

Rhonda, 

 

Hearing from you has triggered a lot of old memories and I’ve been thinking about us a lot. 

 

I’m curious about what happened to you. I have no idea what you have been up to for all these years. I always conjectured that you were having as varied a life as I was. 

 

I’ve been careening through the universe going hither and yon, like a penguin hopping from one melting ice floe to another. You were just as much of a reckless youth as I was, and I would not have been surprised to find out you’d led an adventurous life. From reckless youth to old recluse, that’s me. I’ve been in the Red Queen’s race, running as fast as I can just to stay in one place. Except that now I’m falling farther and farther behind. I don’t know if it would surprise you to find out that I became a computer geek.

 

Last Christmas at Matt & Nancy’s in Santa Barbara, Nancy showed me the IRS search app she’s been using in her tax business and I gave her a couple of names to check. Turns out that a  guy with the same birthdate and middle name as Mark Schumacher died in southern California in 1999, but the search showed that nobody named Rhonda Nadine Sutherland had ever been born ten years either side of 1947 in Sandy Ridge, nor any other city in Virginia. What the heck, I thought, did I marry some kind of Russian mole?  

 

That was cleared up when you told me about reverting to Stallard. 

 

I’ve been thinking about you a lot since you contacted me. I hadn’t thought about us for a long time. I googled your name a couple times a year, maybe, but the only references that came up were links to my own site. I’m an easy guy to find on the web; my site has been operating since 1995. I’ve been contacted by people who were childhood friends who googled themselves and found my pictures of them from the 1950s, but I haven’t heard from anybody more recent.

 

The only logical conclusion is that nobody was interested in contacting me. My first impulse upon hearing from you was to be cautious and skeptical–I have one network of friends who are elite hackers, and who knows what kind of pranks they might be pulling. But then as soon as you identified Scott as the photographer of the picture of you, I knew that nobody else in the universe could have known that. 

 

I’ve been rummaging in that dusty old box of memories a lot, stuff I hadn’t thought of for years. Who knows how accurate the memories are–mostly fiction, with me as the hero, no doubt. Or just random things like Parsey and Peter Lorre seeing themselves in a mirror (for the first time in their little kitten lives) in a motel room on Route 66 in Pontiac, Illinois.  

 

Anyhow, I don’t know if you’re interested in correspondence. I’d like to find out what you’ve been up to. Compare notes. But I don’t know if you want to talk about old times. Maybe I’m just another piece of shit MAN you’re trying to scrape off the sole of your shoe after erasing all traces back to the Stallard days. 

 

It seems to me that I’m still the same jerk I always was, a lazy megalomaniac procrastinator, but I’ve managed to get a few things done. What a long strange trip it has been, as the Grateful Dead say. 

 

 

On Oct 20, 2013, at 8:41 PM, Rhonda wrote:



Colin,

 

First of all, I’m not sure why your friend couldn’t find my birth record.  It has nothing to do with the fact that I changed my name in court–that took effect on the date I did it, and affected only the future. I had no trouble obtaining a birth certificate copy in 2005.  I was not born in Sandy Ridge, an unincorporated area in Dickenson County, nor was I born in a city.  I made my appearance in Tazewell County, and my parents lived in Jewell Ridge at the time.  I suspect that was another unincorporated area, in Tazewell County, I presume.  So–no Russian moles here.  That would have been exciting!

 

I have also dredged up a lot of old memories, starting with the kitten freak-out.  But my memories of that differ markedly from yours.  In the first place, I couldn’t remember Peter Lorre’s name. Second, I remember that happening in a motel room in Needles, CA, after we had driven across the desert in August in that black ’65 Ford Fairlane with no AC.  I thought the kittens and I were going to succumb to heat stroke before we found a motel.  No air conditioning, before or since, has felt more wonderful.

 

I would like to maintain our correspondence.  While you were being a penguin, I guess I was being a wolverine, digging my den and staying out of peoples’ way.  At least for the last couple of decades.  My attitude toward men changed enough that I happily took Richard’s last name when we married.  My name change to Stallard was the symbolic severing of the last ties between me and Robert Kristofferson.  I am not a man-hater–not even a flaming feminist as long as I get paid the same as a man does for the same work.  I am not very politically correct.  I once posted an 8-1/2×11″ sign in my office that proclaimed “PI and Proud.”  My boss was such a mental giant that he asked my why I was referring to myself as a private investigator…….

 

I was not nearly as reckless a youth as you were.  I was just hanging on to your coattails for the ride.  Occasionally I did something reckless, like taking the job at Daisy Mae’s.  Of course, I am not the same person I was then. For instance, I now belong to Mensa, the Republican party (though that may change), the Community Church of Cheney.  Are you sure you want to hear this? Let me know.

 

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
To: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>
Cc: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Tue, Oct 22, 2013 7:16 am
Subject: Re: From reckless youth to old recluse

Well, at least I got the “Ridge” part right. I looked at maps of Virginia some time in the past and found Sandy Ridge and that must have reinforced my false memory. 

 

I’m not sure what you mean by “Are you sure you want to hear this?” when you mention Mensa, Republicans, and church. 

 

I don’t belong to any organizations. 

 

I attended a few Mensa meetings in Santa Barbara, looking for beautiful braino babes, no doubt, but the people struck me as post office employees fretful that their genius wasn’t appreciated on the job. I’m certain that virtually all of my pals these days are Mensa eligible…especially the hacker ensemble. They are dauntingly smart, in fact, but it gives me a funny relaxed feeling to be the dumb one in the room. 

 

I voted Republican in 1980, Libertarian in 1984 and 1988, and then in 1992 I voted for Ross Perot and only women candidates on the rest of the ballot, and I decided to withdraw my support from the electoral system and have never voted since. An odd change for me because I had been an avid voter, a researcher on candidates and issues. I learned to not get professionally involved in election advertising because the candidates do not pay their bills.  

 

As for church, I have possibly been in churches for weddings once or twice in the last 40 years. Didn’t we attend somebody’s wedding at the Crystal Cathedral in LA? A couple more times after that. I believe that the Judeo-Christian ethos is the best operating system for human advancement, but I’ve created my own set of religious beliefs based on quantum-mechanics hocus pocus. 

 

Like Schrodinger’s kittens seeing themselves in the mirror for the first time simultaneously in Pontiac, Illinois and Needles, Arizona. I’ve had a couple other memory oddities in looking at my old documentation. I clearly remembered that the last time I saw you, at Karen Schumacher’s graduation party, there was a terrific seven-run rally by the Tigers in the ninth inning and us guys at the party were captivated by it, to the detriment of the party in general. But according to my daily appointment book from 1979 the big Tiger rally was two months earlier at a different event at Kay’s place. 

 

According to my memory, I had drinks with you and Dennis at some Irish bar in Detroit around this time, but I can’t find any mention of it in my various obsessive-compulsive recordkeepings. I remember being astonished that your preferences in books and movies and music and weekend activities were now exactly identical to Dennis’s, where previously they had been identical to mine.  And it made me realize, eventually, that I had no idea what your actual preferences might be. 

 

I’m still pretty darned reckless. Operating without a net. But that’s the way I seem to like it. Still on Colin’s Quixotic Quest, whatever it is that I’m searching for. I had a strange job nibble last spring when NASA called me and asked me to apply for an opening at the Ames Research Center because they’d found my portfolio of writings about science topics  and thought I’d be a good fit for the job. I interviewed for it but then withdrew from consideration…it would have been fun to write about the latest doings of the Mars rover, but going through three levels of inspection at Moffett Field made me remember my deathly aversion to government and bureaucracy.  And security. And every paragraph requiring approval from the legal department. Gaaah! 

 

 

 

On Oct 24, 2013, at 8:50 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

No, you got the Sandy Ridge part right–I just wasn’t born there.  My family moved there when I was 2 years old.

 

You have the advantage of me where memory is concerned.  I don’t have any documentation of my life–as a matter of fact my memory is somewhat like a garbage dump instead of a library.  I do not remember Karen Schumacher’s graduation party at all, not even a wisp of recall.  I also do not recall ever having drinks with Dennis and you at an Irish bar.  There were only two that I patronized, the Tipperary Pub and the Old Shillelagh.  I have some very clear memories of both and you aren’t in them.  I can only remember a couple of times that I was there with Dennis–it was usually Barbara with me when I went on a Guinness run.  As for your statement that my book, movie, etc., preferences were “identical” to anyone’s?!?  All I can surmise is that you weren’t listening.

 

Security is very important to me.  My home is a sort of Quonset hut, but it comes to a point on top instead of being rounded–sort of a Gothic arch.  It has only 2 windows on the ground floor, each 4×6, and I have bars on them.  The house is made of metal, and all the exterior doors are steel.  All of them have deadbolts.

 

That Ames Center job sounded interesting.  It’s my belief that bureaucracy can always be manipulated from the inside.  I learned that working for the State of Washington for 22 years.  I did read the “Girl of the Month Club,” and I found it quite interesting.  There were some very clever touches, and I found your futureworld believeable.  However, I thought your denouement was a bit abrupt. 

 

 

 

On Oct 26, 2013, at 7:16 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

“All I can surmise is that you weren’t listening.” Well, yeah, that’s what I was saying. I’d just been looking at my own reflection. 

 

The trouble with the documented memory is that it’s humbling to look back and see iron proof of what I was actually doing, and not the candied version stored in my brain. 

 

I read all of the diaries of Samuel Pepys in 1978 and 1979 and I guess that was part of the impetus that led me to start writing everything down. I sold a car in 1989 and the new owner later thanked me for the little notebook in the glove box with the date and mileage for every gas fill-up and service since the day I’d first bought the car. 

 

I don’t think I was this way when I was with you, but I don’t really remember. Because I don’t have any notes! 

 

One thing I found was that writing about my problems helped me figure things out. I guess I mentioned that before, my typewriter therapy. Writing about old traumas seemed to erase them. 

 

Security is not important to me. I live in Campbell, California, pop. 42,420, a bedroom community abutting San Jose on the southwest side, just before the hills begin on your way to Santa Cruz. I don’t lock the door of my apartment unless I’m leaving town. I have a Ruger SP-100 .357 magnum under my desk with two spare 5-shot speedloaders, but I’ve never had any cause to brandish it. 

 

“Not Safe” was a song by Romeo Void thirty years ago and I kind of took it as my theme song. “I’m not safe (and I’m not sorry!)”. Being a freelance writer was not safe. Still is not, but I’m still at it. It’s hard for me to imagine working for just one outfit for 22 years. Looking back at random in my journals you would find the same bleat repeated: it’s near the end of the month and I had no idea where the rent money would be coming from. I lived by making big scores occasionally. 

 

I found work by cold-calling. Just phoning hundreds and hundreds of places until I found somebody who needed something written.  In 1986 I found a company in Santa Barbara that needed an ad written, and some other stuff, and the project lagged when the art director in charge intentionally put it on the back burner to “teach the client a lesson,” and I went to visit the company president and asked him what was going on, and I inspected the project and told him I could complete all the graphic production by Tuesday, no matter what that art director is claiming. 

 

So I became in charge of the whole project, and more projects came up, including instruction manuals for all 24 products. I produced 12 of the manuals and the client was by now accustomed to paying $2,000 or so for the typesetting for each manual.  I bought a Macintosh SE computer and an Apple LaserWriter in June 1987 for $8,000; I set the type for the next dozen manuals using the Mac and the laser printer, and charged the client the standard $2,000 per manual, and cut the typesetter vendor out of the picture. 

           

And I paid off the computer and printer and bought a Saab and spent the next year learning how to use the computer and the software. I became immersed in the Santa Barbara Macintosh user’s group as the editor/publisher of the monthly newsletter, and that branched me into the bulletin-board systems, the BBS groups that were the precursor to the Internet. I had an office on the fifth floor of the Granada Building in downtown Santa  Barbara, the tallest building in the city, just down the hall from the state senator’s office. 

 

I started doing lots more graphics work than writing work. I got the contract to do all the graphics for the City of Santa Barbara’s drought emergency warnings and advisements for a couple years…I remember being at a party and hearing one mother complaining to another, “My five-year-old has never seen rain, doesn’t know what it is.” 

 

Then the drought was over and I looked around and all my former clients had vanished and everybody and his brother had a Mac and a laser printer. I had to flee town and went to San Francisco and stayed with some BBS pals until I found  work producing packaging for a toy company, and dozens of other little projects. Ups and downs and I discovered that San Francisco is too weird for me, and I moved to Silicon Valley and accidentally ended up in Campbell. 

 

I started doing more Web stuff and since 1999 I’ve done almost nothing else besides Web work, writing for sites and creating and maintaing sites. I had the best earnings years of my life during the dot-com boom.  Then the crash of 2008 and I’ve barely worked since. 

 

As far as GIRLCLUB, yeah, it just stops like hitting a tree. I worked on it a long time and then the magazine deadline was upon me and I abandoned the story to its fate. NAUSEA PISTOL is similar except that I did write three more chapters of NAUSPIST leading up to a nice conclusion, but writing the story just made me sick and I set it aside without inserting those final chapters.  And now I find out that the story has wide circulation in some dumb online vomit-fetish subculture. Just what I dreamed of accomplishing!

 

I’m working on a long story now, THE NANOGATHERERS, that takes place about a hundred years later than the time of OLD AL. It follows a group of sort-of Amish trailer trash who have the North American continent to themselves after most humans have either retreated into Old-Al style synthetic reality cells, or they have gone into space to aid in the robots’ expansion into the Solar System. Robots have taken over the baton of advancement and they fondly take care of humans as pets. The Tribe rejects that and they live their own lives away from technology. 

 

I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to complete it, at the pace I’m going. It took me 12 years to write GIRLCLUB. 

 

I have earned money with my fiction. In 2002 a Web site sponsored an essay contest asking for a “Dark Vision” of the future, and offered a half-ounce gold coin to the winner.  I was galvanized by the idea and kept waking in the night with further story elements bubbling in my brain. I made my essay a fictional “letter to my father.” A couple hundred other people entered the contest but I was voted the winner and they actually sent me the gold coin. 

 

 

 

On Nov 9, 2013, at 7:48 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

This is my favorite time of year, and I have menus to plan & gifts to buy, wrap and send. Since I have heard nothing from you in 2 weeks plus, I think it is time to terminate this correspondence. 

 

 

On Nov 9, 2013, at 8:04 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I was wondering why you hadn’t replied.  I guess my email of October 26 got lost in hyperspace. 

 

I’ll send it again. 

 

 

 

 

On Nov 10, 2013, at 7:05 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Well, I checked to make sure your October e-mail wasn’t lurking in my spam or trash, so I guess is it floating around in hyperspace.  I had to make sure I hadn’t deleted it without reading.  Sometimes the combination of poor short-term memory and hand tremors can wreak havoc on my e-mail.  I don’t have tremors all the time, but when they occur I privately refer to them as my “earthquake” days…

 

Your choice of career seems to suit you, and that’s really all that matters. I know mine suited me like a glove (I am the Queen of mixed metaphors).  I could never be comfortable not knowing where the next rent money would appear.  I finally took care of that problem permanently by paying off the mortgage on my house back in 1997.  I drive a 2012 Kia Soul, paid off for the same reason.  All I have to worry about is taxes on the house and insurance on the car, and that makes me feel more financially secure than I did when I had loan payments.  This works for me, just as your lifestyle works for you.

 

I’m glad you told me what happened with the end of GIRLCLUB, because you’re right about it stopping like hitting a tree.  I liked it anyway.  The Nanogatherers sounds very interesting.  Is part of the reason the robots take care of the humans the certainty that humans will die off?  Especially if they’re not allowed to breed? 

 

I’m impressed by your marathon cold-calling.  I could never be successful at that.  One of the reasons I liked my job with the State was that I was always operating from a position of power.  I didn’t have to beg parents to pay their support–I just attached their wages, or their bank accounts.  The worst part of the job (maybe 1% or less) was dealing with sex offenders that had molested children.  I always felt like I needed a shower after talking to them. Bleah!

 

I think I have assembled all the ingredients for my fruitcakes, except for the brandy.  But I don’t need that until they’re baked, so maybe I will bake tomorrow.   I always think of Parsy when I make fruitcake–he’s the only pet I’ve ever had that would eat it, much less love it like he did.

 

 

On Nov 12, 2013, at 9:03 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I stole the plot for GIRLCLUB from a Walt Disney movie, FANTASIA: the “Sorceror’s Apprentice” segment. 

 

 

I don’t remember anything about Parsy and fruitcake; I remember he liked Jello and corn on the cob. One night when we were first living in Anaheim I woke up because of an earthquake–the little quivers jolted me awake back then–and Parsy was snoring tucked into my left armpit and you were snuggled with your nose in my right ear and you were snoring, too, not wake-the-neighbors snoring but little snores just like the kitten. A moment of serene calm in my life. 

 

I don’t waken due to micro-quakes any more. It’s the other way around: when I visit relatives in Michigan, I wake up wondering why the earth is so dead, so immobile. I’m more at home with the constant seismic spasms. I feel the earth move under my feet, etc. 

 

In NANOGATHER, the characters reject technology and the assistance of the robots, although as the story develops you see that they are hypocrites–just as dependent on technology as everybody else. I’ve been impressed by a book, WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS, by Kevin Kelly; he lived among the Amish for a little while and met a segment of them who renounced electrical power and the internal combustion engine as religiously as the rest of the Amish, but used air-powered pneumatic tools to get things done while retaining their halos. 

 

In my story, the trailer-trash folks are the only ones doing any breeding. The robots are forced to be hands-off because they need humans for the irrational insertion of oddballs whims that turn out to be crucial for innovation. Or something, I’m not sure yet whether the robots actually need people, or if that’s just a wistful imaginary belief of the Tribe.  

 

Who knows if my choice of career suits me. I’ve pushed myself into it in such a way that I no longer have any alternative. I don’t even know what my career is. Freelance sit-on-your-butt-and-read-all-day guy. People ask me what my retirement plans are and I say, “Retire from what?” I’m like the comic strip character Andy Capp, who’s been on the dole so long he can’t remember what kind of work he’s out of.  Is it easier to write some goddam brochure, or jump off the Golden Gate bridge? So far, writing brochures has a slight edge. 

 

In a few minutes I’m bicycling four miles to the offices of Zircon Corporation, where I will use Photoshop to modify the picture of a tool for insertion into the package design. The indicator lights are in the wrong positions. Then I’ll use the InDesign page-layout software to insert the Photoshop image. This is for a dying industry, PRINT, and here in Silicon Valley there are only 499 other guys scrambling to stay above water on each dwindling floe in the Antarctic sea. 

 

Then if the Web director is back from jury duty I’ll make changes to the company’s Web site using DreamWeaver software. I wrote the company’s first site in raw HTML code fifteen years ago; then Dreamweaver came along and made HTML coding irrelevant. Now a newer software, WordPress, has shoved Dreamweaver aside and I’m scrambling to learn it, going to WordPress meetings and reading WordPress books and sliding further behind because WordPress depends on a dynamic code called PHP to modify the HTML. I’ve learned everything else on my own from books, but I might have to take a PHP class to stay in the Red Queen’s race. 

 

Luckily, Zircon is such an ancient and wheezing place that my Dreamweaver skills look shiny and new to them.

 

Here’s a photo of me and Parsy that I suppose was taken by you:

 

 

On Nov 15, 2013, at 2:59 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

The earthquakes I’ve experienced here (2) are very different from the ones in California.  Both occurred while I was at work.  The first one caused my office chair to roll abruptly across my cubicle (with me in it!) and bump into the wall.  When the second one hit, I thought a semi had smashed into the building. It was just a solid WHOMP! that shook our 4-story building.  Newscasters explained that the big bang was typical of earthquakes occurring in bedrock.  

 

I think my Christmas shopping is either done or planned.   I have 4 gifts yet to buy, but 3 of them will be gift cards and one will be something from Harry & David’s that I will order in December.  I should be getting to my Christmas cards, too.  This year I ordered pet silhouette cards–they’re very cute.  Speaking of cards, isn’t it your birthday today?  Felicitations!

 

I remember an earthquake from the Anaheim apartment, too.  You shook me awake & told me to stop moving my feet.  I swam up from the depths of sleep & said “I’m not moving.  The bed is.”  And then I apparently just went back to sleep.   

 

I just got off the phone with my cousin Doris in Michigan.  She called me with some medical questions, but I also had some advice for her.  A couple of months ago, her sister told me that Doris was going to give some money to a charity to benefit elderly Russian Jews, but the sister talked her out of it.  Meanwhile, I got a mail solicitation from a charity purporting to do the same thing.  However, suspicion is my middle name, so I ran the charity through charitynavigator.com and it wasn’t even listed…Several lawsuits have been filed against the Rabbi in charge for misuse of funds.  I told her about all of that, and she confirmed it was the same organization.  Doris has a good heart, but she trusts people too easily.

 

 

 

On Nov 19, 2013, at 5:19 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Yeah, Friday was my birthday, thanks. I’m older than you again for another five and a half months, you young whippersnapper!

 

Today I’m rebuilding the cat’s scratch post. The top ten inches of the scratch post are gone except for frayed tatters, and I’m going to prune them off down to the wood and put a layer of white glue on the wood and wrap some fresh new 1/2″ rope around the blank spot, with each end hammered down with a brad. 

 

The first time the scratchpost got tattered, I bought a new one, but the damned cat refuses to scratch it to this day. 

 

I don’t start thinking about my Christmas cards until December.  I’ve been creating my own cards each year for a long time…it’s so much easier now with all the computer and printing technology in our homes, which makes it more ironic that the day of the snail-mail xmas card is coming to an end, another victim of email. 

 

I usually spend Thanksgiving and Christmas at my brother Matt’s place in Santa Barbara.  I frequently have two Xmas dinners–I’m a regular at the family dinner of my pal Henry who was the director of photography at Santa Barbara Magazine and today is a prominent architectural photographer. He’s my oldest friend since I slammed the door on my previous life…when I arrived at the Greyhound station in Santa Barbara in 1975 I called Scott and he picked me up and we went to lunch with his co-worker Henry, and we’ve remained friends ever since. 

 

I’ve got to molt over the coming holiday season and emerge in January with a new skin. I’ve completed most of the work for the packaging and instructions for the electronic tool company and I don’t have much of anything else lined up. The Zircon people are nice but they are not at all Mensans;  the company remains in business because of long-held patents. 

 

I’ve got to repackage myself and be public about it. People in Silicon Valley know me only as a graphics person, and I’ve fallen and I can’t get up in the race to stay ahead of the onrush of technological innovation. I’ve got to re-establish myself as a copywriter. Juggling English is still a non-technological sport. 

 

Reminds me of a time when I was living in San Francisco–I was wrestling with some complicated computer upgrade when the landlady came down the stairs to ask me to feed her cats while she went on a trip, and she asked what the heck I was doing with all the computers dismantled, and I explained how necessary this upgrade was, and she laughed and said she was glad she was in a field where there has been no technical advancement in over 400 years: she was a violinist in the symphony orchestra and her tool was a Stradivarius. 

 

Anyway.  In 2014 I must find a new floe. 

 

 

 

Begin forwarded message:



From: scott campbell <scottc840@att.net>

Date: November 21, 2013 6:59:45 AM PST

To: “colin@colin.org” <colin@colin.org>

Subject: your ex

Reply-To: scott campbell <scottc840@att.net>

 

Found this pic while cleaning up my office at home…..

My wedding reception…? The pic has January 1972 printed on the back.

Looks like you have had a few, and Mary with the ubiquitous cigarette….

S

 

 

On Nov 23, 2013, at 8:42 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Looks like none of us are feeling any pain……

 

 


On Nov 23, 2013, at 9:34 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I am not feeling like a young whippersnapper today–more like my whip snapped back & knocked me down.  I’ve been dealing with an ankle problem (not the bruised tendon–that’s pretty much healed) since APRIL.  It’s the OTHER ankle.  I woke up the last Friday in April with what I assumed was a mosquito bite on the front of my ankle, right where it bends.  Big white welt, itchy, swollen.  To minimize the 6-month story, the swelling and pain never went away completely.  My doctor was clueless, so finally, on Halloween, I went to a podiatrist.  In the last 3 weeks he has put 2 shots in the ankle joint  and ordered an MRI.  The MRI caused a big jump in the pain & swelling, simply because they immobilized my foot for 30 minutes with my toe pointed.  So now I’m done talking about that.  The whole point was that I can’t sit at the computer and put my foot up at the same time.

 

Merry was declawed on her front paws when I got her (that made it all the more abusive that they turned her outside!) but she has a few favorite places to sharpen her paws.  She is polydactyl, and particularly in pictures she looks as if she has on white mittens.  I’m thinking I may have to buy some more steps for her.  I have one set of three steps that sit permanently at one of the front windows so she can easily access the window and chatter at birds, traffic, etc.  Her food, one water dish and litter box are on the counter in the utility room.  I’ve had dogs AND cats since 1996, and dogs kind of consider the litter box to be a snack bar…..She currently has a flat-topped feed bin to jump on first on her way to the counter, but it’s 19″ high.  Maybe a bit too much for a 17-year old cat.

 

I also bought a scratching post for Merry–she literally scratched it once.  I finally gave it away.  I would like to replace her litter box, but I’m afraid of what she might do….or not do.

 

I’ve been invited to Thanksgiving dinner with my friends Lance and Kelly and their 3 children (2 adults, 1 13-year old.)  I met them in 1997 when Richard did some surveying for Lance.  Despite the difference in ages–they’re 16 and 20 years younger than me–we all just clicked and have been friends ever since.

Kelly and I both love to cook, and we decided to make some ethnic dinners together.  We did Mexican, Greek, southern, French.  It was all very much fun.  We even did a bunch of research and did a “Foods of the Bible” dinner and invited the pastor and his wife.

 

I’m going to wrap this up and go roust Jesse out of my recliner.  Actually he’ll jump up on the arm, wait till I settle in, then slide down to my lap.  He’s come a long way from the scared, skinny little dog I adopted.  Also, I don’t want to tire you out, seeing as how you’re so much older than me. hahahahaha

 

 

On Nov 26, 2013, at 6:22 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

 

 

I completed the new scratch post and, predictably, Nuke is avoiding the newly refurbished area. He’ll come around as the mysterious evil of New Stuff fades. 

 

I can’t stand the idea of de-clawing cats. Brrr. One time I was almost going out with this beautiful gal at the ad agency in Detroit, going to the ice skating rink at lunch with her, but nothing serious–she was too much of a liar. Then she started arranging things so the rest of the agency thought we were sleeping together. She got a kitten and then within days, you won’t believe it, the kitten SCRATCHED her! So she immediately took it to the vet to have it declawed. That iced it for me and I shunned her after that. 

 

I’m trying to remember if you ever told me about having an imaginary companion as a child, and your mother saying you were different than other children. I remember you telling me about having to cross a rickety rope bridge on the way to school, and your disgust when your mother told you the new place in Detroit would have an indoor bathroom. An outhouse inside!?

 

But mostly I can’t remember what we talked about. 

 

Maybe it’s because I actively suppressed all the memories from my 20s. Plus I was drunk half the time. I don’t remember much of anything about my three years of drinking my brains out on the Woodward strip. 

 

Not that I stopped drinking my brains out when I started working at Santa Barbara Magazine. But I started keeping better records. I started actually writing stuff every day. I studied hard to learn the precepts of professional copywriting. I never went back to school but I became intertwined with the University of California, Santa Barbara, for several years, writing stuff for the Alumni Association and the Chancellor’s office, and a recruitment brochure for the computer & electrical engineering department.  Professors called me and asked me to write articles for Santa Barbara Magazine about their research.  I thought the Chancellor was a venal sham and loathed my necessary contacts with him, and I was filled with schadenfreude a few years later when he was indicted and jailed on corruption charges. 

 

I’m driving down to Santa Barbara tomorrow in my 1994 Saab. Thanksgiving dinner will be populated not only by Matt’s in-laws, as usual, but also another family we’ve known for 35 years but who haven’t been part of our turkey-day festivities.  A family emotionally frozen since the oldest son flipped his schizophrenic lid and stabbed the father to death, and then when  the grandmother stumbled onto the scene, he cut her to shreds, too. The remainder of the family has had great difficulty developing new relationships with people, so they’re stuck with the friends they had before the murders. 

 

I don’t think it’s unusual to have good friends who are 20 years younger. Almost all my friends today are 20 or 30 years younger than me.  I had a big wave of new friends  in the late 80s and early 90s when the computer bulletin board system was fresh and new and it was mostly kids who were able to learn how to use it, and it was a self-limiting group because you had to be smart and literate to get in. No dummies allowed, and then I instigated a series of BBS meetings so we could meet in the real world. They were surprised to find out I was an old fart but that didn’t matter in our mental explorations of what has become the Internet. I’m still in touch with a dozen of them.  

 

Then in 1999 I took a job as a writer at one of the first on-line auction sites, the Internet Shopping Network, and was plunged into a bullpen filled with other freelance writers. They were all 30 and under and I was 53, but we clicked as a group and I still know a dozen of them today. 

 

I don’t know why things worked out that way. I met hundreds of people in my constantly changing freelance venues in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but didn’t develop many continuing friendships. Maybe it’s because I’m a smarty-pants elitist. 

 

Have a good Thanksgiving!

 

 

 

On Dec 1, 2013, at 10:28 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Post-Thanksgiving:  I did not eat too much, and had a lovely time at my friends’ home.  They had overnight guests from Idaho (relatives, I think) who brought their 2 dogs.  They were concerned when they found out I (a grandma type with a chihuahua) was coming, but my friends assured them I love dogs.  Rocco, a 2-yr old Boxer, was active, but he did not jump on people.  He was quite friendly and kept shoving his nose into my hand.  The other dog, Jefe, is a dark brindle mastiff/pit bull cross.  He is very impressive–about 100 pounds and very quiet.  He’s 10 years old.  He managed to insert himself under the dining room table and stretch out on his side without anyone noticing!!

 

Has Nuke gotten used to the new rope on his scratching post yet?  Merry & Jesse thought the tidbits of turkey from Thanksgiving were just delightful.  Jesse even took them directly from my fingers, which he usually won’t do.  He was terribly hand-shy when I adopted him, and I think not taking food from my hand is part of that.  So–the turkey is a step forward.  Of course, I had boiled eggs for breakfast this morning and he wouldn’t take the egg white from my fingers.  Maybe the turkey was just irresistible…

 

Here’s a hypocritical stance for you:  I agree with you about de-clawing cats–I think it’s a mutilation.  BUT–scratches invariably get infected due to my vulnerable immune system.  So I compromise by adopting only previously de-clawed cats, and cope with the occasional scratch anyway.  I can give dc cats the best home for them, as I have inside cats only.

 

Richard had 2 declawed blue point Siamese when we met, male littermates named RC and KC.  They were strictly indoor cats, and had occasional freak-outs IN TANDEM.  I had just come home from work one day and sat down in my recliner with a cup of coffee.  They were curled up on his lap in his recliner.  There was an end table between the chairs.  All of a sudden, they leapt off his lap, bounced off the end table and knocked the hot coffee into my lap and all over the wall, dug into my nylons and knees and landed on the back of the futon, and sprinted to the other end, where they stopped on a dime, still side-by-side, and proceeded to wash their faces.  Both of us had deep puncture wounds, but we started laughing and trying to figure out what set them off.  They were actually very good cats, and survived Richard by about 3 years.  They lived to be 18 years old.

 

Gad.  I just realized this entire e-mail is about animals.  Well, this is the true Rhonda.  I am the crazy cat (or dog) lady without the hoarding aspect.  I hope your Thanksgiving was enjoyable.  

 

 

 

On Dec 4, 2013, at 6:30 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Nuke is still avoiding the new area, but drifting his claws into it occasionally. I’m sure it will soon fade into being just his normal scratch post.

 

You are hereby excused for owning a declawed cat. Rescuing them is honorable. Nuke has claws but I’m not sure he’s a real cat–he’s never been outdoors for a single moment in the eight years I’ve had him. He’s never been hot, he’s never been cold. He’s never hid under leaves, he’s never had fleas. Never tasted blood (except mine). Never caught and killed anything bigger than a bug. 

 

My previous cat was a huntress of the first order.  

 

 

I had a pleasant Thanksgiving in at Matt & Nancy’s house in Santa Barbara. My eldest nephew, Luke, 35, brought his new girlfriend for her first Thanksgiving. Literally her first, because she’s from a Jehovah’s Witness family that doesn’t recognize the holiday and she is now shunned by her family for consorting with a non-JW. She works at the Santa Barbara animal shelter where Luke volunteers on weekends, and that’s how they met. 

 

I brought a big kabocha squash to the feast and chopped it into chunks and boiled it in a syrup of some chunks of odd brown sugar that my produce market guy urged on me. Kind of a pot-luck Thanksgiving; Nancy roasted a 22-pound turkey and Matt charcoal grilled a big spiral sliced ham. I peeled ten pounds of potatoes but Nancy doesn’t like the way I mash them so the kitchen girls took over after I peeled. I set a record this year by not adding any blood to the mix while peeling.

 

We had an early meal because one of the attendees from the family of the murderer brother had to leave for her dialysis appointment. She can’t get on the list for a kidney transplant until her multiple myeloma goes into remission. 

 

In the evening the crowd changed as the elderly and infirm went home and friends of my nephews showed up to hang out. The gang was talking about playing a board game and I talked them into playing Dictionary. I knew them all as kids and then as college students, and now they’re men out in the world and its so fun to see them stretching out and doing good stuff. My nephew Ian, 28, is an electrical engineer now with a company in Ventura. His pal Andy is now a set designer on the hit TV show MAD MEN–he and I yakked a lot about the latest Macintosh graphics programs. Kyle has discovered that creating video games isn’t as much fun as he expected and even though he made a ton of money he’s quit and is looking for a new career. Chris is debating whether to go back to school for his master’s degree in mathematics. Justin has discovered he doesn’t like being a CPA and is now enrolled in a veterinary school. 

 

Exemplary kids who give me hope for the next generation. 

 

Friday a bunch of musicians showed up. Matt and Nancy play in the Strawberry Music Festival twice a year–Nancy’s a cowgirl singer & guitar player, Matt’s on banjo. Other performers who happen to be in Santa Barbara on the holiday often drop in for practice session. I formerly would join in on guitar, but a softball injury deformed my left ring finger ten years ago and I can no longer grip chords. 

 

Then I drove up to the mountain aerie of my photographer pal Henry and his wife Carol for dinner and gab. He was ebullient because he’d just landed a new project to document the construction of some vast estate. He got the job by showing his portfolio of photos to the guy on a 60-inch video screen. He wanted  me to know that, because I built his portfolio site. 

 

I’m still trying to build up a clientele. My doctor called me on Monday to ask me to make some changes to the clinic’s Web site–he was going into the hospital for elective ear surgery, and the clinic would be closed for two days. I put a banner on the home page. Now he tells me the other doctor has quit and the site will have to be revamped…this is good, because I swap my Web work with him for my medical expenses. I’ll build up a tab in case of my next broken bone. Who needs ObamaCare.

 

 

 

 

On Dec 6, 2013, at 9:21 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Merry is an occasional huntress, and she definitely wants me to know when she has been successful.  One morning several years ago, I got up to visit the bathroom (barefoot, of course.)  I always turn the light on, but I don’t operate at 100% – or even 10% – in the middle of the night.  On the way down the hall, I dodged an anomaly on the carpet strictly out of instinct.  Coming back, I stopped and took a closer look and it was a headless mouse.  While I was cleaning up, I was berating Merry for hiding her tiny guillotine, and couldn’t she just eat the whole mouse like a normal cat?!?!? I looked up and she was sitting on her brisket on the end of the bed.  She just squeezed her eyes at me.

 

By the way, Nuke has also never been subjected to cruelty by strangers, never had to tangle with a car, and never had to worry about being coyote food.  He’s a real cat, just like Merry is. In the 9 years I’ve had her, she has only ever been outside in a crate to go have her shots, her teeth cleaned, or her annual physical.  Needless to say, she hates the crate. 

 

I have been mulling something over for several weeks now and have no answer.  Perhaps you do.  I don’t ever remember meeting Matt?  When I looked at the pictures on your website, I recognized you, your dad, Marty, Scott, Mary and Gerry.  But I have absolutely no memories of Matt.  I don’t have any memories of interacting with Lainie, either, but that feels real.  Either you had no interaction with Matt when we were together, and therefore neither did I, or some grinch has gotten into my memories and painted him out of the pictures.

 

I envy you your location today.  The low temperature tonight is supposed to be 2, with winds gusting to 35 miles per hour.  That’s dangerous enough for the weather people to declare a “windchill warning” and tell people to stay indoors.  You know, I hadn’t really planned on taking a walk….It takes me longer to get wrapped up to take Jesse out than it does for him to take care of business.  He is not going to be happy the next time, as the wind has picked up already and it’s only 12 out there now.  So–I’ll be putting his sweater on him–not his favorite thing.

 

 

 

On Dec 8, 2013, at 8:36 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Your memory is 99.9% accurate: we had virtually zero interaction with Matt and Lanie, but you did meet them briefly. We stayed at their place one night ( I think) in Mannford, Oklahoma in 1969 on our way across the country. Matt was working in the oil fields and didn’t take time off to visit with us. I don’t remember anything about that visit except that their bathtub was out of operation and so they were using it to store hundreds of record albums, many without their sleeves. 

 

Matt and Nancy attended our Halloween party in Anaheim in 1972, but that was a giant raucous affair and they and Scott and Mary Jane left no memories in my brain, although I recall everybody playing Pin the Nose on Nixon. 

 

I never subsequently had much contact with Lanie, as I considered her a lying thieving sneak, but Matt and I became pretty darned close after I moved to Santa Barbara in 1975. We both tried to learn how to be self-employed. I made signs for his car repair shop:

 

 

 

On Dec 12, 2013, at 11:23 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I’m glad to hear I hadn’t forgotten a whole person.  I don’t remember meeting them in Oklahoma, but at least a whole relationship didn’t go swirling down the lupus drain.  However, there is a tiny frisson of memory about the record albums in the bathtub.

 

I, too, remember playing pin the nose on Nixon.  I also remember people screaming when they went in the bathroom and glimpsed your giant papier-mâché spider peeking out from behind the shower curtain.  Terry Wright was so freaked out he fell and put a hole in the wall with his head.  I also recall our “witches brew”–1/2 pint of white liquor from each attendee and Hawaiian punch.  I don’t recall Scott & Mary Jane or Matt and Nancy being there either.  I seem to recall that “Ed” (can’t remember a last name, but he was a doofus of the first order)  showed up and spiked the punch with LSD.  The party was pretty much over by midnight.

 

The doctor gave me four choices to treat my foot.  Do nothing, and hope it eventually heals; custom orthotics ($400 that the insurance company will not pay), shots of Sarapin, an organic, holistic anti-inflammatory ($30 per, which insurance will not pay), or surgery.  I’m trying the Sarapin, for a couple of months anyway.  Unlike steroid shots, Sarapin can be given indefinitely.  I have not had good luck with orthotics, and I certainly don’t want to jump right into surgery. Stay tuned.

 

The weather has “warmed up” to the high twenties.  Break out the shorts!

 

 

 

 




On Dec 15, 2013, at 9:10 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Memory sure is funny. The Oklahoma people remembered you vividly because of some kind of animal-print stretch pants you wore. Clothing just doesn’t register in my memory unless I make a mental note to remember it. I guess I’m still just a nudist at heart…the hot tub boom started in Santa Barbara around the time I arrived in 1975 and I fit right in with that culture and one of my first nationally successful ad campaigns was for a hot tub client. 

 

It’s not just clothing, though: I can’t remember anything unless I consciously attach a verbal tag to it. I can’t re-run a mental videotape and “see” things I didn’t previously notice. I’ve told several people about the test you took, I forget which government agency administered the test…showed a photo of a scene, and then the photo was removed and you had to answer 100 questions about the scene. 

 

My semi-eidetic memory was useful in my adbiz career. My colleagues were often agape at some of my performances in client meetings–I’d cram my head with tons of info about the client, and then when a client objected to some aspect of our proposal I would have the facts and figures ready at hand about why I’d chosen to do it this particular way. 

 

But I called it my “waitress memory”–the waitress can bring five orders to the table and put the right ones in front of the right people, but what did her customers at 830 last Wednesday order? Poof, gone. It happened to me once when I wrote a 64-page catalog for a stereo component company, I was awash in brochures and fact sheets from manufacturers for two months, and then a couple weeks after the catalog was printed, a friend asked me advice on his upcoming stereo purchase–and it was all gone, and all I could remember was that I used to be able to do the maze as fast as Algernon. 

 

The funny thing was that in the most intense client meetings that my colleagues were in awe of–I had virtually no memory of the event. It was as though some hyper-Colin took over and processed things on such a fast high level that I couldn’t keep up and it was just a blur.  I felt guilty about their praise because it didn’t seem as though I’d actually done it. 

 

It’s sure been odd for me since you and I have become pen pals. The turbulence of our years together was overwritten by further turbulences and I was scrambling for survival and my more recent disasters preoccupied me. Every once in a while I’d realize that the entirety of my professional career happened after we parted. I’ve changed skins several times. 

 

So I’m looking back at our events with a new point of view. Mostly it’s an unexpectedly comfortable feeling about my life: even though it’s true that I’ve gotten through by the skin of my teeth while clinging to the cliff face with my fingernails, I’ve done it by being a writer and an artist, just like I always wanted. 

 

I slammed the door on the previous Colin and it’s strange, now, for me to look at him and remember stuff. Maybe it was my experience as a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman that strengthened me to be able to cold-call ad agencies later. I’m still impulsive and manic-depressive, but now I occasionally manage to get things done. 

 

Too bad I didn’t start earlier. 

 

I really appreciate it that you’re able to corroborate some of my memories. I’ve spent my life as an ad huckster and a fiction writer and I’ve lost track of how many lies and misrepresentations I’ve perpetrated over the years, and so I’m no longer sure where the line is between fact and self-deceit. 

 

I’m glad to find out we actually did have a Halloween party and it wasn’t some imaginary event. The thing I remember about our “witches’ brew” is the dry ice to keep it bubbling, and I thought it was the carbon dioxide fumes that knocked out Terry, resulting in his head going into the bathroom wall.  

 

And I don’t know if I remember the LSD spiking…I believe I was in an anti-LSD  mood at that time. Remember watching Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon’s surface on July 20, 1969? I barely do, because I drank a bottle of bourbon while you and I and Barbara and Jerry watched on TV.  On July 20, 1989, PBS ran a minute-by-minute video replay of the landing and the first step, and I watched every moment while zonked on LSD.  

 

I’ve remained an occasional acid-dropper, although it’s really hard to find right now–haven’t had any for five or six years. I’m a daily dope smoker, but nothing else. Gave up booze three years ago next week. I’ve tried almost every drug at least once. Finally smoked crack cocaine a couple years ago, bought it on the street in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco with a swimmer from the Israeli Olympic team. I did it as a lark; I didn’t realize how badly the guy was hooked on the stuff. I think there must be a genetic component to the susceptibility of people to cocaine addiction because some people become complete slaves to it, while for me it makes my nose numb and I can’t sleep, and that’s it. Or perhaps it’s not genetic, just my magnificent steely willpower. Except, I’m helpless in the face of alcohol addiction.

 

My beliefs about drugs crystallized around a book I read by Andrew Weil, THE NATURAL MIND. He believes that a lot of the problems of addiction revolve around the mistaken identification of the “physiological noise” of a drug with the intended pleasurable effects.  “Wow, this stuff made me puke my guts out–it must be really good!”  

 

Anyway, I’m remembering my life in a new light now that I’m remembering it as if I’m explaining it to the girl I used to know. You mentioned that you’re a Mensa member, and I said most of my pals were probably Mensa level. I was thinking mostly of my hacker pals in the Cult of the Dead Cow, the world’s foremost hacker group, who are stratospheric brains far above my level–they keep me around as a mascot. 

 

Well, but are the rest of my pals Mensa level? I started sifting through the people I know, and even though I’m this solitary old hermit, I’m realizing what an extraordinary batch of people I know. Writers and artists and photographers and designers, sure, but also my friends turn out to be self-employed. Independent people.  Or highly specialized–one of my pals is the sniper-in-chief for the California Highway Patrol, for instance. He teaches long-distance shooting to cops and competes in national tournaments–it’s hard for me to imagine hitting a target at 1,200 yards using iron sights (in the non-scope division) but he’s a champion at it. And his dull day job is as bodyguard for the Governor of California. 

 

I’m not sure if this guy is Mensa or not. His brother claims an IQ of 154 on his Facebook page, so it could run in the family. They’re a pair of Aryan supermen, 6′ 8″–bigger than Jack Reacher! 

 

The more I examine the people I’ve known, the more I marvel at their accomplishments. I hadn’t realized this until I opened my box of pals to show them to you. 

 

Anyway. Good luck with your ankle treatment. Last year I had these white veiny things appear on my tongue and gums and the doctor diagnosed it as “lichen planus,” and suggested a local oral surgeon who could verify it and give me steroid injections. But I looked at the same Web page my doctor was looking at and it said steroids were only marginally effective and had serious side effects, and the page also said some success had been noted with aloe treatment. So, being as broke as can be, I opted for a $5 jar of aloe gel rather than a medical specialist, and the tongue crap went away after six months. 

 

No doubt my “ignore it and it will go away” attitude will kill me eventually. It’s all your fault, I saw how doctor’s errors added to your woes. That’s when I learned the word “iatrogenic.” 

 

 Have you figured out what is wrong with the ankle? 

 

 

 

 

On Dec 18, 2013, at 2:02 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

It certainly is:  I still don’t remember stopping in Oklahoma, don’t remember the animal-print stretch pants and don’t remember taking the test you referenced.  Egad.  I thought only my short term memory was affected – “lupussed” ,as it were.  I used to be able to do the cram-and-spew thing, but have not had occasion to use it lately.  Don’t think I’d be very successful now, as the very first symptom of damage to my memory was an inability to hold several documents in my mind as I flipped between screens.  For instance, before filing a garnishment, I would need to review the pay record, work record, address records, child support order, etc. As soon as I switched screens, I’d forget what was on the prior one.  I was diagnosed with lupus in July of 2003 and finally retired at the end of July, 2005.

 

The podiatrist who’s treating my ankle with weekly injections says it’s an inflamed tarsal nerve and/or ligament.  If a couple of months don’t improve it greatly (i.e., no pain) he can do surgery.  The MRI showed only an area of swelling in front of my anklebone.  That was one nasty bite!

 

It is odd, this pen-pal thing.  I’ve subsequently been three different wives, a step-mother in name only to 4 children, and have a closer relationship with a step-daughter (Lynn.)  Her children call me Grandma Rhonda.  And, my longest life shift of all has been to that of widow, since November 17, 2001.  When I look back at my life, I see mistakes and, more importantly, I see learning.  I don’t have many regrets.  

 

When bi-polar order was diagnosed in 1983 and I started taking lithium, that was the biggest life-changer of all.  I stopped self-medicating with alcohol at that point (I didn’t do any other drugs.)  That ultimately led to the destruction of my third marriage, because I was no longer the bird with a broken wing.  School was in for a long time on that…

 

The Halloween Party:  Everyone was upset with Ed for spiking the punch, because he did it without telling anyone.  Like I said, a real doofus.  I also remember that we covered the walls with pink plastic, then spattered it with black-light paint.

 

Oh–I beg to differ with your version of July 20, 1969.  You may have been with Jerry and Barb and a bottle of bourbon, but I was in Beaumont Hospital with a raging strep infection.  I clearly remember watching it on the hospital TV.  What I don’t remember is whether or not you were there.  You did come to visit me, but I can’t place you there for the landing.

 

I know you said you do Christmas e-cards, but I send them the old-fashioned way.  So if you would like one, I need a physical address.  Up to you. 

 

 

 

On Dec 18, 2013, at 3:06 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

No, I said the day of snail-mail cards is coming to an end. I’ve never done an e-card. I remain an atavism, a knuckle-dragger from the antique era of print. 

 

My cards are at the printer at this moment. Usually I print them myself but this year my Canon i9000 high-end printer has unexpectedly kicked the bucket.  

 

My address is

 

Colin Campbell

600 Marathon #106

Campbell, CA 95008

 

 

I have you on my list as:

 

Rhonda Morley 

20525 Highway 195

Spangle, WA  99031

 

 

 

On Dec 20, 2013, at 10:35 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

With the help of my tattletale journals I’ve started to notice that my memory is conflating events. I hadn’t actually thought about July 20, 1969 for a long time. If I did think about it, the label on the file said the four of us watched at Jer & Barb’s and I got real drunk. Now I actually look in the file and it’s empty. Did we ever meet at their house to discuss the details of our cross-country drive and meet up? I’m only conjecturing as to why my brain is presenting this shadowy falsehood. 

 

I don’t remember you being in the hospital that day, but maybe I just don’t remember that day at all. I don’t remember visiting you at the hospital. I think this is just another example of the ad hoc leakiness of human memoy: everybody remembers their own selection of events. Nobody can remember everything. 

 

Or, at least the ones who can remember everything are typically plagued and distressed by it. My blind crippled retarded brother Gerry is an idiot savant who supposedly can rattle off the day of the week for any date in history. “July 20, 1794? Sunday.” However, I don’t know that anybody has ever checked to see if he’s right. 

 

I hadn’t been aware that lupus had neurological effects. My memory had it filed away as raccoon rash and arthritic joints. I looked at an article, “The Brain in Lupus,” 

 

http://www.the-rheumatologist.org/details/article/968011/The_Brain_in_Lupus.html

 

“As in other disorders with white-matter [brain] pathology–such as HIV and multiple sclerosis–cognitive dysfunction in lupus may represent primarily reduced brain efficiency and not reduced brain function.” 

 

The article says studies suggest that cognitive dysfunction in lupus is more likely transient and reversible than permanent.

 

So it sounds like there’s hope. My own daily cognition is Internet-enhanced and so I’m able to write a lot smarter than I actually are. I have no idea if I could still perform my old feats of cramming…my eyes have a lot of floaters and maybe an incipient cataract. These bits in my field of view are adding descenders to letters in the words and I’m not reading as accurately as I usta. I can’t tell my ascenders from a hole in the ground. 

 

The white-matter link with MS seems to corroborate my sister Lanie’s claims of her lupus morphing into MS.  Or rather it was the diagnosis that morphed into MS. But she was such a constant liar about every aspect of life that I dismissed it as simply another welfare ruse. 

 

What kind of printer is conking out on you? Are you on Mac or PC?  I can’t afford to repair or replace my high-end color inkjet printer right now, but I have a black & white laser printer for daily stuff and a color laser printer for client presentations etc. 

 

I don’t remember if I was keyboard-obsessive when we were together. In 1979 I fell in love with the  IBM Correcting Selectric keyboard, but after I switched to computers starting in 1982 I was constantly trying new keyboards trying to find the right one.  I always hated the keyboards that came with Macintosh until these flat little aluminum wireless keyboards came out five or six years ago, and I now have 7 of them because they wear out fast under my constant pounding. There’s a mystic communicative crispness to the feel of the keys on a brand new keyboard. I suppose it’s probably just “new car smell.” 

 

I’ve never had any hint of repetitive stress pain from my constant keyboarding–no carpal tunnel syndrome, etc. Earlier in my life I’d heard that broken-bone injuries return as arthritis in old age, but so far that hasn’t happened to me. My sibs are not as lucky. Matt is pretty well crippled up after a lifetime of heavy manual labor (car repair) and motorcycle racing injuries. Scott’s got an artificial knee and is scheduling hip replacement surgery. Mary had to swap her 9mm Glock for a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver because her hands have become so arthritic she could no longer rack the slide on her Glock. Plus she has some persistent debilitating rash on her hands. 

 

Still no clues as to the cause of your ankle inflammation?  Oh, I see I got it mixed up with your ankle injury, I was going to say my usual “Walk it off,” the way us manly sports gents handle stuff, but you’re talking about the other one, inflamed since an April welt erupted. It wasn’t an insect bite, but was it caused by something else, a thorn scratch, a chemical? Or was the surface welt a result of the underlying swelling? My only inflammations are occasional eruptions of shingles on my butt, but I haven’t had an attack in many years. 

 

I had severe inflammation of my shoulders when I was about 40 and I could barely lift my toothbrush to my mouth. Then I stopped doing handstands, and the inflammation mysteriously vanished. 

 

 

 

 

On Dec 21, 2013, at 11:12 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I agree with that article in that the brain effects are not static–some days I are smarter than others…In my experience, ALL the lupus symptoms wax and wane.  What you refer to as a “raccoon rash” is generally called a “wolf mask”–that’s how the disorder was named, back in the dim and misty: lupine, wolf, lupus.  Funny thing:  I had to get rid of two perfectly good semi-autos.  I could still rack them, but could not load the clips.  I chose a .38 caliber Charter Arms Undercover to replace them.  It only holds 5 rounds, but that should be enough, if you’re aiming. 

 

I have been absolutely unable to come up with any memories of planning to meet Jerry & Barb at the Pink Pussycat.  I know we did sit down together and plan it…..maybe it was at my apartment?  I don’t recall ever being in their house.  

 

I developed cataracts in both eyes and had one fixed in 2008 and the other in 2010.  Now my vision is 20-20 in both eyes, but I have to use “cheaters” to read.  The eye doctor said that lupus probably hastened the onset of cataracts because of sun damage.  While we’re talking about medical stuff, the long-standing inflammation of the tarsal nerve/ligament in my right ankle started with a mosquito bite almost 9 months ago.  The other ankle (that I dropped the garbage can on) is all healed.

 

I am a PC person.  I have a Gateway tower, a Dell monitor, a Microsoft mouse, and a Microsoft Natural keyboard.  I was asked to try one of the Natural keyboards at work years ago and subsequently refused to go back to the straight keyboards.  Anyone who sits down at my computer HATES my keyboard, so I point out that the “P” in PC stands for personal………..The printer that is currently giving me fits is a Kodak ESP Office 2100 series.  I got it because the Dell printer I had refused to work–until the day I received the Kodak.  Now the Dell is hooked up to my old Dell tower that lost its internet capacity, a second-hand monitor, and the new Gateway keyboard and mouse.  Why, you ask?  Because the newish Gateway with Windows 8 has no word-processing program.  I know that I can download one–a free one, even.  I just haven’t.  I have worse luck with downloads than I do with printers……

 

 

 

 

On Dec 23, 2013, at 10:47 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’ve put a couple thousand rounds through my Ruger snubbie. I bought it at a gun show…I brought a $20 gold piece and had a romantic idea of tossing the gold on the counter in exchange for the revolver. But the guy running the booth where I bought it was an employee rather than the owner and he had no authority to make the trade nor to accept anything other than the sticker price. 

 

I wish now that I’d gotten the 4″ barrel instead of the 3″, because it took me a long time and a lot of rounds to regain the accuracy I’d demonstrated using revolvers with 4″ barrels. Also, the recoil is too much for Candy Ass Colin’s hand when I use .357 ammo, so I only shoot .38s.  I know a lot more about handguns now and I’d get a 4″ .45 if I were buying today. 

 

I suppose I could still get a .45, except that my .357 is grandfathered in: I don’t have to ever renew my permit. If you buy a handgun now in California, you must re-register it every three years, or some such. 

 

I prefer revolvers over semi-autos. Who knows why. Revolvers are brain-dead simple, and I’ve learned through experience how  one’s mind can freeze in extreme emergency situations.  Plus, revolvers are good defensive weapons: I don’t intend to be on the attack. Unlike Scott, who has lots of revolvers and semi-autos and an M-16  .223 rifle and so much ammo you’d need a forklift to move it, and maybe land mines in his front yard, for all I know. He sleeps with a 9mm under his pillow. 

 

Scott remained entwined in Southeast Asia for a long time: every year, he’d fly to Thailand with a shipment of supplies for Montagnard refugees and teach English for a month. Or that was his cover story–perhaps the real draw was the Patpong bar girls, I don’t know. One morning he woke up naked in an alley with a red injection mark on his arm and no memory of what happened;  after that, he brought a bodyguard on his trips, a Canadian Golden Gloves champion.  

 

Scott’s been a world traveller; besides his frequent Thailand visits, he also spent a lot of time in Bolivia trying to set up an iguana-meat import business, and in Taiwan setting up manufacturers for custom youth shoes he was going to import. Anything to make money outside of the mentally debilitating Detroit advertising business. 

 

I’ve never been anywhere, myself. One of the infections my immune system has repelled is the travel bug. Part of it is because as a freelancer I don’t get X weeks paid vacation from the boss, and if I had X weeks vacant on my schedule I’d be in screech mode trying to find new work. Also, I’ve lived in exotic travel destinations like Santa Barbara and the San Francisco Bay Area…one day I walked to the corner store in Santa Barbara and the Queen of England rode by and she waved at me from the back seat of her limo. She was in town to visit President Reagan and torrential rains had washed out her motorcade’s planned path and so she unexpectedly went by my apartment’s area, all without me having to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

 

I had my first-ever exposure to Windows 8 today. A neighbor gal knocked on my door and asked for my help in setting up her new El Cheapo HP computer & printer so she could print her resume. She recently lost her job as a biotechnician at a local Bayer Labs facility and despite her technical position she’s never learned anything about computers, never had one in her home. Huh, I didn’t think such creatures existed in Silicon Valley. My last exposure to Windows was five or six years ago on XP machines, but I was able to border-collie my way through it and get her wireless printer up and running even though it was like working upside down and blind in zero gravity, for a Mac user.

 

 

It sure seems as though we would have memories of planning our first California trip. It’s strange to reach into my familiar memory box and find all these vacant chambers. Maybe it’s like Mark Twain said–“When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.” 

 

You mentioned that Jerry Cartwright died; “Perhaps you knew already,” you said, but I had zero contact with them, ever; the last time I saw them was in (1974?) in Michigan. I went to some house on some errand or another and you were there and the three of you were engrossed in some board game with little octagonal game pieces and I couldn’t engage any of you in conversation, and it seemed clear to me that they’d decided to keep the Rhonda half of Colin & Rhonda and wanted nothing more to do with me. A brittle and strained encounter. I never heard a single bit of info about them again until now. 

 

And all I remember from that encounter was the game pieces of some board game. I guess it looked like an interesting game and you guys didn’t want me to play.  

 

What did Jerry and Barbara do over the years? It’s sure strange to be at this end of the timescale and looking back…I googled their names several times over the years but “Jerry Cartwright” gives 9,370 results and I had no idea how to narrow the search.  Googling “Jerry Cartwright” and “Sears” takes you right to the picture of him on my site. Chasing my own tail. 

 

Anyway. Merry Christmas. In the morning I’m driving to Santa Barbara to spend the holiday at Matt & Nancy’s house. 

 

 

 

 

On Dec 26, 2013, at 9:04 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I trust your Christmas trip turned out well.  Mine did, though it doesn’t really qualify as a “trip”–my friends live 5 miles away.  Good food, good company, and I was introduced to the grown-up taste of tawny port–in all my years of drinking, I don’t recall ever tasting port.  It was quite delicious.

 

As far as guns go, I’m probably halfway between you and Scott.  I have a Taurus .38 with a 4″ barrel, but it is much harder for me to hold steady than my little Charter Arms.  I also have long guns, but the little .38 is my first line of defense.  I had a male friend (ex-Navy) at work who had never met a woman who had guns, much less enjoyed shooting.  He and his wife were here for dinner several times.  One day at work, out of the blue, he said “So when are you going to put the 50mm gun turret on top of the house?”  Of course, I deadpanned “As soon as I find the right contractor…”  He is retired now and I haven’t seen either of them in years, but he was never REALLY sure that I was kidding.  It’s kind of fun to run roughshod over peoples’ preconceived notions.

I’ve traveled around the Northwest, in situations from a tent to a big fifth wheel, and that has satisfied any urge I had to travel.  This is some of the most beautiful country on earth, and any traveling I do would be to re-visit places I fell in love with–like Crater Lake.  I’ve always told friends and family back east that God made the Northwest because He needed a place to stay when He visits.  Crater Lake is His retreat within the Northwest.  Whimsy rules.

 

This is a familiar refrain–I do not remember your visit to a house where Jer and Barb and I were playing a board game.  I think the board game you’re referring to is “Diplomacy” but my memories of playing that include you AND the Cartwrights, and we were in California.  It was a very intense game, and Jerry was better at it than any of us.  I suppose the actual events lie somewhere between your memories and mine.

 

Interesting about California’s gun registration–here in Washington they register people instead of guns.  I last renewed my concealed weapons permit in 2012, and it expires in 2017.  The initial permit application requires fingerprints and a full background check.  I think at each renewal they just check your criminal record for the last 5 years and any involuntary mental health committal.  I’m probably wrong about this, but I don’t think there’s any record all in one place that lists the guns you buy.

 

I’m sorry this is so jerky but my printer REFUSES to print your e-mail, so I have to review it repeatedly before I can respond to what you said.  This Gateway is my first experience with Windows 8, and I seriously thought I was going to have to call The Geek Squad to come to my house and help me (how humiliating!!)  But I persevered and got it to work for me.  Whether it is working the way it was intended is anybody’s guess!

 

As far as Jerry and Barb, what I remember is pretty fragmented.  Jerry and Barb and Dennis and I met in San Francisco and had a drink at the Top of the Mark.  It seems to me that they were living somewhere just outside San Francisco; we were on our way to Washington and a job for Dennis at Boeing.  Cut to 1981: Jerry and a live-in girlfriend with her year-old toddler visited Washington; Barb is living north of Seattle with Tim Streng, whom she married at some point.  Can’t recall the name of the town, but they lived on Pull-and-Be-Damned road. I don’t think I ever saw Jerry after that.  I divorced in late 1981, remarried 10/82 and only saw Barb intermittently after that.  At some point she and Tim divorced and she was living in Tacoma.  I wrote to her there, and the rest of the story I think I told you:  She called on Christmas Day 2009, when I was in the middle of chemotherapy treatments, and could not understand why I didn’t want company.  I haven’t heard from her since.

 

Hope your Christmas was merry and Happy New Year!

 

 

 

On Dec 28, 2013, at 8:47 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

My Christmas trip turned out fine, thank you. A 600-mile round trip in a pseudo-race-car reverie. A battle of wits to go faster than anybody else, but not catch the attention of the police. 

 

I’ve made the same trip maybe a hundred times over the last twenty years. I still love looking at the mountainous countryside…when I visit back in Michigan, I’m struck by the dullness of the terrain. 

 

More memory surprises for me in Santa Barbara. On Christmas Eve, somebody brought up the topic of a Caribbean cruise that my father gifted all his descendants with for an xmas present in 1996. I recalled an incident on a private bus we chartered in Jamaica–my sister Lanie was bemoaning the lack of Pepsi on the cruise, as Coke had the franchise. The bus driver said, “You want Pepsi?” and pulled over to the side of the dirt road in a residential area of a cow-pasture district and yelled “Anybody got a bottle of Pepsi?” and children came running out carrying bottles of Pepsi. 

 

No, says Nancy, we were in a jungle area and it was a planned marketing stop by the bus driver, and lots of other kinds of vendors besieged the bus. 

 

She claims her memory is superior to mine. I remember a jungle stop at a crafts shop on a different bus ride on the trip. Perhaps she is mixing up the two events, or maybe I am. 

 

But who knows, and this was only 17 years ago, not 40 years ago like us. I was struck by it again during the fiftieth anniversary mediafest for the JFK IN DALLAS show, when I discovered that I don’t have any personal memories of those days except for the moments when I heard the news. Everything else I remember about those days is stuff I’ve seen on TV. Not my own memories at all. 

 

The memories from the old days now seem like individual strobe-lit events with no context, like the game-piece thing.  I mostly remember a narrative that I decided upon a long time ago, and I’ve set myself aside from the guy I used to be. The old memories are paved over with fresher mistakes. 

 

I don’t have a concealed-carry permit. They are virtually impossible to get for a private citizen in California. I was talking about it with a guy at Matt’s house at Thanksgiving, Matt’s former employee who now has a tool truck with a daily route of gas stations and repair shops selling replacement wrenches etc; he’s a merchant and has a large inventory on wheels and occasional large sums of cash, and he wanted a carry permit but had a hearing in which his application was denied. 

 

Then, outside, a cop who had been in attendance at the hearing told him unofficially that he had the same right to concealed carry as any other store owner on his own premises, and that’s the way the case would be seen if anything ever came up and he was forced to use his weapon. 

 

If I need to carry my gun, I will, permit or no. That’s one reason I got a snubby.  Matt went the other way: he’s got a .357 Smith&Wesson 686, a seven-shot revolver with a six inch barrel.  His theory is that the big-ass gun will scare away the opponent when he sees it. It’s as long as your forearm to your fingers. Damned accurate, but I’m accustomed to the huskier trigger pulls of the Rugers. The Smiths feel like hair triggers to me. 

 

I don’t feel any need to carry here in lily-white Campbell, CA.  We’ve had three murders in the last eighteen years, and there’s very little street crime.  

 

I guess it’s not surprising that Jerry and Barbara broke up–statistically, I mean. I just hadn’t considered that while not thinking about them. I thought of them mostly when reading about studies of relationships initiated by a shared traumatic event. 

 

By now it’s clear to me that most families are ongoing soap operas of unbelievable stuff. For instance, sometime in the mid-80s, Kurt Schumacher knocked on my door at my apartment in Santa Barbara.  He was hitchhiking from LA to San Francisco and hoped to spend a night on my couch. I never much cared for him since that time when he stole our car, but I allowed him to spend one night. He’d sired two or three kids and was living in Florida, and then met the girl of his dreams and abandoned his wife and family and job and went to live with her in LA. And now the day before yesterday he just found out that his dream girl was a surgical trans-sexual, a former boy who’d had some work done. 

 

Cripes. It made me care even less about whatever happened to him after that. I’d already long since axed my connections with Mark Schumacher by then–in July 1981, Mark and his current babe visited for the holiday weekend, and I stayed at my girlfriend’s place and gave them my apartment to use.  When they’d gone, I discovered that Mark had trashed my apartment. It started when he tried to read my copy of GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL. He ran into a lot of old words that he didn’t know, and he tried to look them up in my unabridged dictionary, to no avail. So naturally he broke the book in half and tossed it into a wastebasket and set it on fire, and then added the dictionary. Then the fire got a little out of hand and he doused it with beer. He found my dope stash but couldn’t figure out how to use my favorite pipe. So he broke it in half and threw it out the window. And other minor depradations of things knocked askew, a big mess. A few years later he and Kay stopped for a visit but I was politely distant with them. I never had contact with them again.  He was living a dangerous life of injectable drugs and promiscuity as a taxi driver in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS epidemic, but apparently he survived until 1999. 

 

Scott had Ed Siever unexpectedly drop in on him at his ad agency job  fifteen or twenty years ago and Ed dissolved into a blubbering tearful cascade of words about something or another that Scott didn’t quite understand. Ed had to be escorted out.

 

I got your xmas card. Are those the actual comparative sizes of Merry and Jesse?

 

 

 

 




On Dec 30, 2013, at 1:43 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I’ll answer your last question first–yes, those sizes are pretty accurate.  I took both of them to the vet on December 16 for their yearly physical, blood tests, etc.  Merry weighed 11.3 pounds and Jesse weighed 5.8.  (Odd that they measure in tenths of pounds….)  Merry weighed over 15 pounds when I adopted her, so the vet wanted her to lose 3 pounds or so–he says she’s at a good weight now.  Jesse weighed a couple of ounces shy of 5 pounds when I got him.  You could feel all his ribs and see his backbone, so naturally I fed him too much (!) and he gained up to 6-1/2 pounds.  I adjusted his food, and he’s back at a good weight too.  Since an ounce means so much to his weight, I bought a postal scale and weigh him every week.

 

I’m sorry to hear all that stuff about Kurt and Mark.  But Mark and Heidi were always a couple bubbles off plumb, and Kurt and Lisa were just a little strange, in a different way–like you always knew they might break, and when they did, it would be spectacular.  I hadn’t thought of any of them in many years. Sad to hear about Ed Siever losing it at Scott’s job.  Sad for Scott, too!  I didn’t even know they knew each other.

 

I know what you mean about the scenery.  I moved to the Seattle area in January and started working in downtown Seattle and living in Auburn.  One day in March, on my way home, I came around a curve on I-5 and ran right out of the right lane onto the shoulder.  Mount Rainier was “out”, as they say, for the first time since I had moved there.  I’ve never seen anything that impressive, then or since.  It fills half the sky.  When I moved to Eastern Washington, I really missed the mountains, and evergreens, and the rain forest.  But, this area has its own beauties.  For instance, I had never really known what “amber waves of grain” meant.  Winds move the wheat just like waves move the ocean. 

 

Memories are odd–sometimes I think I view them with rose-colored filters, or at least I would like to…I try to prevent myself from rewriting, but if I can’t remember, I can’t rewrite!!

 

Matt’s .357 sounds impressive–I’m afraid I’d wind up shooting at the bad guy’s feet* because the gun is so heavy.  My little Charter Arms .38 fits in most any pocket.  It has been my experience that most men are terrified of ANY gun in a woman’s hands, especially a grandma’s…..

 

 

 




On Jan 3, 2014, at 10:36 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

My cat’s size is variable. 

 

The good thing about small dogs is that they last longer. Scott invested a lot of emotion into his Samoyed and then was devastated when the dog died of old age at 8, and has not returned to dog ownership. Scott installed the “invisible fence” on his property to keep Sammy penned in, and it took the squirrels about  2.3 milliseconds to figure out the invisible boundaries, and they immediately began taunting the dog by sauntering slowly just a few inches outside the line. Nyeah, nyeah.

 

Meanwhile, I have to get to work. I must send a fabulous email to local ad agencies and Web design shops that will make them drop everything and call me to hire me to write their next site. So far I have a blank page. My deadline is Monday, January 6. All I can think of these days is the negative attributes of Colin, and I must try to focus on the positives. I’ve never been good at self-promotion. I’ve worked with several people who are the greatest advertising geniuses in the history of the universe, according to their self-promos, but I can’t bring myself to emulate their incomparable, supremely transcendent self-adulation. 

 

But I’ve got to do something. Beat the bushes until a fresh project pops up. 

 

My variably-sized cat:

 

One day he was this big:

 

 

And then, the printer stand shrank. 

 

 

Probably it is due to Vitamin Corn:

 

 

 


On Jan 5, 2014, at 4:38 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I liked The Variable Cat pictures.  Small dogs usually do live longer, but I lost my German Shepherd dog and my dachshund mix 6 months apart in 2009, and they were both 12.  Jesse is so small that I always stay outside with him–there are hawks and eagles and owls here.  I don’t think hawks or eagles  see me if I stand still, because their attention is on the ground.  It’s kind of funny to see them put on their air brakes once I step toward them and wave my arms.  Owls are a different matter.  The first time I took Jesse out at night, I didn’t think to look up.  There was an owl perched on top of the house and it announced itself by hooting, then swooping away over my head.  It had about a 4-foot wingspan and scared the daylights out of me.  Jesse was oblivious.  I bought a good little Maglite and check up top every night.

 

Self-promotion is not my strong suit either, so I am fresh out of words of wisdom on that subject. 

 

I have found a couple of pictures of Merry and Jesse to send to you if you want them.  I don’t have a current picture of me, but I’ve taken a couple on the roll that’s in the camera.  If you want a picture of me, and of Merry and Jesse, let me know.

 

Good luck with the bush-beating. 

 

 

On Jan 7, 2014, at 9:13 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Sure, send me pictures. I’m a picture-holic. When I was at Santa Barbara Magazine everybody on the staff had big-ass 35mm SLR cameras and I absorbed a lot of lore from the photographers, and then I borrowed a 35mm to take pictures when Matt raced in the 1981 Long Beach Grand Prix in the motorcycle sidecar division. 

 

Then my pal Henry trained me in his darkroom and I learned how to make black&white prints–color was too technical and too expensive for me to do by myself in the lab–and I was hooked. I couldn’t afford a full-bore 35mm single-lens reflex camera but I found a shirt-pocket camera that used 35mm film and I became an obnoxious intrusive shutterbug. I have about 10,000 negatives from the 1980s that I’ll eventually put onto my site. 

 

Then the digital era arrived and Henry closed down his lab and I turned to Photoshop and digital cameras. And I’m still a photo fanatic. 

 

We didn’t have to worry much about hawks, eagles, and owls in the part of Santa Barbara where I lived, and here in Silicon Valley it’s even more of a wildlife wasteland. (Also I can’t see the stars at night, and barely can see the Moon and the planets.) 

 

In Santa Barbara my cat wiped out the neighborhood population of bluejays and mockingbirds, and then she decided she wanted to move up to the next level and aimed at killing a crow. She never did accomplish that, as far as I know, but the crows were irked about it. They knew what apartment Racket lived in and I caught this shot of one coming at Racket on the windowsill–there’s no screen in the window: 

 

            The crows figured out it was my cat, and when I would walk to the corner store the crows would cluster around and dive at me. “Tell your cat to lay off,” they cawed at me.  

 

            This battle lasted out the summer and then when the crow babies were off on their own, that was the end of it, and Racket did not resume her quest the next year. Whew. 

 

         I also had a feral cat in the 80s, a giant black cat who was pilfering Racket’s food and I gradually tamed him (but he never became a regular housecat).  He had a strange distinctive voice and he said his own name: “Maraud.” 

 

            Here’s the day when I first trapped him in the house:

 

 

            And then later when he felt almost at home indoors:

 

 

            Meanwhile, I’m just spinning my wheels on my self-promo. Still a blank page. Instead I’ve been working on my new best-selling self-help book, PROCRASTINATE YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS–TOMORROW!

 

            I’ve tried various tacks in my previous self-promos, mostly just quietly modest lists of my projects. I’ve been aiming at the wrong guys, it looks like. My last couple of promos were aimed at Web designers, as the old mainstays of ad agencies and graphics shops have faded away. I landed several customers, but the projects mostly ended badly because Web designers have no idea what copywriters are for. The designers are accustomed to using whatever text the client supplies, and if it’s stupid text, shrug, that’s the client’s decision. 

 

            I’ve approached companies that have terrible Web sites and tried to explain their errors, and you’d get farther explaining how ugly their newborn baby girl is. It’s not terrible, because they made it themselves. 

 

        So, this time I’m trying something new: I’m going to analyze these bad sites and explain why they are bad in a series of reviews, and be kind of snarky about it in hopes of attracting attention, while still pointing out very real (and very common) errors.  My hope is that while people are laughing at the stupidity of the horrible examples, some of them will see the same errors in their own sites and will flock to me for repairs. 

 

Here’s an example of a bad site. What do you think this company is selling?

 

            Zero information. And the more you search around on the site, the less you know. So call us now for a free quote!

 

            So, I’m going to make fun of sites like this on a page on my site, and send emails to my mailing list with a link to the new page. Who knows if anybody will notice. 

 

 

 

 

 

On Jan 10, 2014, at 6:51 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Racket must have been some cat to take on the crows–they’re very intelligent birds.  I haven’t had an indoor-outdoor cat since the early 80s.  

 

I’ll put a couple of pictures of Merry and Jesse in the mail tomorrow.  I’ll send one of myself as soon as I manage to take one that isn’t blurred or misplaced in the frame.  I had taken 2 “selfies” on the roll I just had developed, and they showed crisp, clear pictures of the top of my head and my face from the eyebrows up…….sigh.  Hopefully my aim has been better on the roll I currently have in the camera. 

 

I apologize for being so brief, but I have been fighting a headache ever since I got out of bed this morning, and it’s winning.

 

 




On Jan 11, 2014, at 9:51 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Good morning. My headache is gone, for the time being, anyway.  Either my mouse or my hand is acting up this morning, requiring a much firmer pressure to make it click.  Gee, I’m so technical…..The first thing I did was flip it over to take out the roller ball and clean it–oops.  This is an optical mouse.  Gahr.  Why don’t things just work the way I want them to???  I started to watch a new TV series last night that touched on that subject–it involved a federal agent who has a computer chip implanted in his head that gives him access to the internet, etc.  It’s called “Intelligence”.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay awake, so caught only 15 minutes of it.  Having your very own internet access point operated by your thoughts would have to give you an advantage over machines.  Wouldn’t it?

 

A beautiful orange tabby cat showed up under my front window during one of the worst snow storms of the year, in the winter of 2007-2008. (We ultimately had 90+ inches of snow that season, which is one reason I think she stuck around for so long.) I heard her meowing and went outside with the idea that I would coax her into the garage, for starters.  She was wearing a collar and looked to be well cared for.  She wouldn’t come within 20 feet of me, so I set out some food and water just outside the garage door.  After a couple of weeks of feeding her and never getting any closer to her, I bought 3 little chenille cat toys and put them out one at a time.  They disappeared, and there were never any tracks but hers.  About six weeks after I first saw her, I went to get the dishes and put out fresh food and water, and the food from the night before was still there.  And, so were the 3 little cat toys….I interpreted the whole thing as “Thanks, but I’m going home now and can’t carry the toys.”  I saw her once more (at least I think it was her)  I was outside during one of the first warm spells, and I spotted her under a big pine tree about 75 feet from the house.  She was just watching me, so I just finished whatever I was doing and when I looked again, she was gone.  The Tale of the Tangerine Kitty.

 

I looked up the website for Agilone and read their mission statement or whatever they call it, and you’re right–I still don’t know what they do.  It seems to me there is definitely a need for your services if only you can connect with the people who can use them.  

 

I liked the fact that Maraud could say his own name, and the picture of him peeking out from behind books reminds me of pictures I took of Merry during the first few weeks I had her.  But instead of books, she would be peeking out from behind the washer, or the dryer.  I just left her alone, and eventually she came out.  But for two years, she tried to bite me every time I tried to pet her.  It took another 2 years for her to actually like being petted and to seek it out.  Cat time is very different from dog time, or human time.

 

 

 

On Jan 13, 2014, at 11:15 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Crows are pretty danged smart, yep. I wrote an article about crows for SB Mag and when the editor sent me the check, he included a crow call–looks just like a duck call. I went for a walk and was tootling idly with it and crows swooped down to pester me; it turned out that I was giving the baby crow distress call. I learned to use the call pretty well and if I were a hunter I could have blasted lots of them out of the sky.  A couple years ago a neighbor’s 3-year-old pointed to a bird and said “Cwow!” and I dug out the crow call and summoned a flock of birds and the little girl was highly amused. 

 

Meanwhile I’m still banging my head against the wall regarding my self-promo. “Mongo strong,” he said, thumping his chest.

 

So far I have a logo for my Web-criticism page:

 

One time I did a highly successful self-promotional piece for somebody else. I did it for free because it was also for me. The guy was a graphic designer and I thought we would subsequently work together, but instead all we did was rile each other. He didn’t like this and that about my text, and I agreed to some of his changes but defied him about others and told him if he didn’t like it, he could just fire me. 

 

I was working with all these egotistical art directors who were in fierce competition to win prizes from national graphic design magazines. This guy had one idea for his self-promo: a picture of himself (how did he ever think of that?!?) holding a pistol and with grotesque bugs fluttering here and there.  He wanted a nine-chapter detective story about the picture. 

 

It turned out to be one of my best fiction pieces after us elks stopped banging racks together. What a headache. I was adamant about mocking the lust for graphics awards. I filled the story with mythic allusions that the guy never noticed. (Nor did anybody else, apparently.) 

 

The next year, the guy entered the self-promo into the Santa Barbara Ad Club competition and at the awards night it won Best of Show. They displayed the promo on a kiosk so you could walk around and read each chapter sequentially. Some gal from the local ad scene came up to me and gushed, “You must have had such fun throwing this together!”  Yeah, six months of head-bashing and hundreds of pages of revisions to condense everything down into 9 little pages. What fun. I quit three times. Gordon thought I wasn’t idealizing him enough. In the story, I have him change a (sow’s) ear into a silk purse. When he published the promo, he edited it from a silk purse into a “good luck charm,” for some reason, without telling me. Oh well.  The promo won him tons of awards and he got a big job with Apple and I never heard from him again. 

 

All I got out of it was the pleasure of seeing my story reviewed when Communication Arts magazine ran an article about the promo. 

http://colin.org/Copywriting/Other/Mortensen/NewMortensen.html

 

I had a tangerine dream kitten vanish from my ken. A couple years after Racket died, a friend told me she’d found a litter of feral kittens and asked if I were interested, and I was hypnotized by the photo she sent and told her I would take Axel, the one on the left. 

 

She said she wanted to keep the kittens with the mother until they were 8 weeks old, so I could pick up Axel in two weeks. Those green eyes! Then on the appointed day I called Tanya and she said they’d fallen in love with Axel and gave away the other two kittens and were keeping Axel. 

 

Along with her other three cats. I had schadenfreude when Axel failed to pal up with the existing cats and became a bitter loner. He would have bonded and thrived with me!

 

 

 




On Jan 15, 2014, at 3:21 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Judging from the text in your e-mail, you were going to include a logo for your web-criticism page, and a picture of kittens.  I did not receive either one. Yes I did–I just missed the big green bars at the beginning of the message.   I did receive the bug-guy promotion.  Your copy was inventive, but the whole idea of the picture was creepy.  I think you should count it as a plus that you didn’t get along with him. 

 

Considering the total non-function of the Agilone site, I think you should alter your logo to say “I see dead sites.”  My problem is still a dead printer–I just haven’t had the motivation to investigate what’s wrong.  Printers have been my nemesis (nemeses?) ever since I got my first computer (an IBM 8088, precursor of the IBM 276) and dot matrix printer.  That set-up was slow by modern standards, but it worked!  I made all sorts of signs and banners on that dot-matrix printer (all black ink only, of course.)

 

I have to play a somewhat reluctant Patsy Plumber tomorrow–the bathtub was draining slowly, so I think I’ve fixed that with a chemical flush.  But the sink is also draining slowly, and I think I need to get underneath and take the P-trap apart.  Or maybe just disconnect the plug and use the chemical flush on that, too.  We’ll see…This is one of the disadvantages of being a homeowner–there’s no one to call with little problems like the above.  And, if I manage to screw it up (like breaking a piece of PVC pipe or something) I get to call a repairman & confess that I made the mess worse.  And if I perchance do it all right, Merry and Jesse are the only ones I can brag to!  But that’s ok–they’re always supportive.

 

I have a crow story, from Monday’s trip to the grocery store.  At least I think it was a crow…Magpies are very common here, and they congregate on roadkill.  There were six or seven of them on the shoulder of the road, and all of a sudden here comes a crow and scatters the magpies in all directions.  It just touched down, then bounced right back up and flew in front of my windshield.  It came so close to being roadkill right in front of my eyes it took my breath away (I was on cruise control – 60 MPH)  At that speed it would not only have killed the crow but it probably would have broken my windshield.  I was very relieved that it missed me.

 


On Jan 16, 2014, at 11:51 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Your photos arrived. 

 

 

 




On Jan 17, 2014, at 10:33 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Could you define what was “creepy” about the the picture? I’m very interested in this because it made me think of a novel I was trying to write about the Santa Barbara adbiz during the Reagan era–I set it aside years ago; the title was CREEPS IN THIS PRETTY PLACE. 

 

I hadn’t thought of it in many years–it was just a series of comedic events–but suddenly from today I know how the long-term effects of many of the events in the story turned out, and now I think maybe I could take a second shot at it. Weave a plot into it. Could be fun. 

 

Meanwhile I’ve got to complete my New Home Page or die. It’s no longer blank but it’s still nowhere near useful. Also, I’m training Nuke to fly. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Jan 17, 2014, at 2:48 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

First of all, the man is surrounded by BUGS!  Second, his eyes look like he’s flying on speed or just crazy–that in juxtaposition with the gun is ultra-creepy.  Just glancing at the picture makes me shudder.

 

I would say that, rather than teaching Nuke to fly, he has taught you to have the camera loaded and ready to shoot at all times.

 

Sites that make Joyce’s Ulysses seem clear and readable? 

 

 


On Jan 18, 2014, at 8:45 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Molly Bloom’s soliloquy certainly pegs the meter on the Readability scale. I’ve been using the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Index all my career…in the old days I had to laboriously count the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word and the proportion of personal pronouns etc to get the Readability score, but today you can just copy the text and paste it into a Web app. 

 

The soliloquy’s score is astronomical, I’ve never seen anything like it before:

 

Grade Level: 3,147

Reading Ease: negative 8,101. 

 

For comparison, here’s a graphic I made for my Web page:

 

For some reason companies think that if their text is really complicated and difficult to understand, that proves the company is sophisticated and advanced, far more advanced than you, you miserable schlub. Many sites I’ve analyzed have touched the high 20s in Grade Level and negative 40s in Reading Ease, but Molly takes the prize, yes. 

 

My Einstein Award is for companies who present their information as if only people with 3 PhDs are capable of comprehending it. It’s so important, so deep, that it couldn’t possibly have been expressed in any simpler manner. 

 

And usually, if you laboriously slog through their terrible text and decode what it is they are trying to say, it is–nothing, cloaked in buzzwords, abstractions, and passive voice. Boiled down, it means “We’re the best!” with zero evidence. 

 

Their sales text is as riveting as a differential calculus textbook, yet the damned lazy public won’t read it!

 

RELATIVITY might be difficult to understand, but it is easy to read. Einstein took the trouble to step down the voltage so that ordinary rubes with a high school education could understand it. 

 

As for Nuke training me–nah, I’ve been a camera snapaholic for a long time.  I take lots of pictures and every once in a while some of them come out okay. Lots of shots of just the tip of Nuke’s tail as he jumps, etc. 

 

Here’s one of Nuke channeling Satan:

 

 

 

On Jan 20, 2014, at 2:46 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I don’t think I knew there was such a thing as a Readability Index.  I remember something called a Gunning Fog Index, but since I didn’t write position papers or forms, I never had much occasion to use it.  Love the picture of Nuke channeling the Nasty One.  Merry doesn’t do that much anymore.  I do have a picture of her channeling a yoga instructor, but it is far back in my albums.  

 

I have a decision to make that has come earlier than I thought it would.  I told you that Jim & Jennifer had moved to Kentucky.  They have always said they were going to find a house with a person-in-law apartment so that I could come and live with them, yet still have my separate space.  They looked for a house for exactly one week, and found one!  It has a sister-in-law apartment with kitchen, bath, etc.  I thought it would take much longer, so of course had put off any decision.  Fortunately, they are not pushing me to decide.  I’m just stuck at this point.  One day I’m positive that I want to stay in Spangle for the rest of my life, and the next day I’m just as positive that I want to move to Kentucky.  Not asking for input, just telling you what’s going on between my ears….

 

 

On Jan 23, 2014, at 6:05 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’ve barely ever been in Kentucky. Passed through on the freeway. I have a friend who is toying with the idea of moving to Kentucky.  He was the graphics technology manager for a chain of magazines in Los Angeles geeking his life away, and then his grandpa died and left him a million bucks. He’s about 40. He says he’s never particularly liked Southern California but has never been anywhere else. 

 

So he bought a motor home and is taking a two-year traverse of the continent looking at different places and deciding where he’s going to spend the rest of his life, with his first fallback position being semi-rural Kentucky. He wants to buy an apartment complex and be landlord & Mr. Fixit. His main criteria for the locale is the availability of high-speed broadband Web access. Right now he’s in New Orleans and only realized yesterday that Mardi Gras is coming up. Duh. It’ll take him forever to get to Kentucky. 

 

Matt’s family owns a second property in Santa Barbara that has a granny apartment over the garage, and I’m hoping someday to occupy it. The house is occupied right now by Matt’s loathsome brother-in-law; everybody is tediously waiting for the guy to drink himself to death, and then the situation will be clearer. 

 

But that’s far down the road for me. I’m still foraging for a living in Silicon Valley, where a blight has killed all my previous customers and I must become a completely different kind of hunter/gatherer. I’m still seriously blocked about writing my new home page. I now have a hundred pages of typed notes about what I want to say on the first page. Next step: boil it down, and stop writing more stuff to be included!

 

I found a couple of pages of your typing while I was looking for something else, mumblings about a story you were going to write about a mass murderer.  I don’t know if you’re interested in looking at it. 

 

Somewhere in my piles of paper there’s a poem of yours that you submitted to Arizona Highways magazine after one of our drives through the desert. My apartment is filled with boxes, 57 Bankers Boxes of papers and documents and drafts, and I no longer know where anything is. 

 

 

 

On Jan 25, 2014, at 11:46 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I have attempted to reply to your message 3 times, and was kicked out 3 times.  I’m sending this 4th try (if possible) just to let you know what’s going on.  AOL is not even saving my drafts.  Aarrgghh….

 

 


On Jan 25, 2014, at 11:05 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Don’t quite know what you mean by “kicked out 3 times.”  I don’t know a thing about AOL—I was a little surprised to discover they’re still in business—because I was an early adopter of the Internet and AOL was always far behind what I was already able to do. 

 

I’ve had my own domain (colin.org) for nineteen years now, cripes, and haven’t had to deal with third party email providers. Even when I was working on-site for projects with big companies and they issued me a company email address, I never used it and they never noticed.  

 

What kind of connection do you have? Satellite, dial-up, broad-band?  Is the kicking-out due to a sketchy connection, or is it a software glitch?  

 

“AOL is not saving my drafts.”  Okay, I assume this means you connect to AOL and compose your emails there, and then when hit send (or something) the message is vanishing rather than being sent. Or is your message just vanishing before you can complete it? 

 

Some people compose their messages in a text editor or word processor and then paste in the whole message with one keystroke, but I do everything on the fly.  

 

Maybe your Gateway is just sickened by the idea of communicating with a Mac. 

 

 

 

On Jan 27, 2014, at 3:10 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I don’t know exactly what I mean–I’d be typing along and suddenly would be flipped to a different page, either one I’d been on before, or an ad.  My connection is DSL, whatever that means.  All I know is that it is far superior to dial-up, which is what I had before.  AOL is behaving itself today, but I think it was a gremlin that hit more than the computer. 

 

  1. I noticed a light out in the bathroom (one of 8 on a fixture above the mirrors).  I trudged out in the cold garage, got a spare light, and discovered all 8 lights burning merrily.  2.  I decided to heat up my oil & vinegar mixture to make wilted greens.  I put about 2 ounces of the mixture in the microwave for 1 minute in a Pyrex bowl.  At 56 seconds, it exploded!  There was only about 1 tsp of the oil & vinegar left in the bowl–the rest of it  was running down the walls of the microwave. 3.  My tooth exploded–well, not literally.  I don’t think it could have hurt any worse if you had packed the damn thing full of C4 and lit it off.  I finally got in to see a dentist today and he put me on antibiotics for at least ten days before any-

body does anything.  The fool tooth has already had a root canal and crown, so I’m not exactly sure what is left to do.

 

Sorry I can’t tell you exactly what my glitches are–like I said, I think they’re house gremlins…………

 

 

On Jan 29, 2014, at 12:14 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I tolerate pain pretty well (out of long practice) and I got through my broken hip with nothing more than ibuprofen, but tooth pain just drives me up the wall. My self-hypnosis methods don’t work against it. I hope your dentist has it under control by now. 

 

DSL sends digital signals on your existing phone line at frequencies far above your ear’s bandwidth. It is subject to interference during stormy weather if the lines get wet–maybe that’s what’s happening with your AOL connection.  DSL is about ten times faster than dial-up, depending on how far you are from a telco central office. I couldn’t get DSL for a long time (even here in Silicon Valley) because I was 12,000 feet away from a central office and the limit was 9,000 feet, or some such. I switched to broadband from the cable company and it is ten times faster than DSL.  

 

I have a subscription to Major League Baseball.com and I can get every game across the country in high definition, and the quality is so good you can’t tell the difference between it and a regular local San Francisco Giants telecast.  I’m still a total baseball freak but I was able to shed my Tiger fan hood. I became an ardent Dodger fan while I was living in Santa Barbara–well, it was easy to be a fan of a team that kept going to the World Series–and then I moved to San Francisco just in time for Barry Bonds to arrive on the Giants and now I’m a Giants fan.  

 

 

On Jan 30, 2014, at 5:58 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

You’re right about tooth pain–I think it’s so bad because the soft tissue can only expand so far before it hits bone.  The antibiotic has helped the pain, though I still can’t chew on that side and people might still guess that I have a chipmunk somewhere in my family tree.  I have an appointment on Monday with an endodontist. 

 

I’m not really into any sport, except it’s hard not to be somewhat involved with the Seahawks since they’ve made it to the Big Dance.  Prior to this season, most references one heard about the team here in Eastern Washington referred to the “Sea Turkeys.”  People are fickle: a lady wrote in to a columnist on the Spokesman Review today and said she was puzzled by the angry people she encountered on her way home from the airport–people gesturing, shaking their fists and single finger salutes.  When she got out of the rental car in her driveway, she realized it had Colorado plates…

 

I have gotten interested in NASCAR again–after I saw Dale Earnhardt crash and die at Daytona in February, 2001, the shine went off the racing for me.  Though I’m not the fanatic I used to be, I usually catch all the televised races.  Ah, but the best “sporting event” on TV comes next month–the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.  I always watch that.  

 

By the way, I would be interested in seeing whatever I wrote lo these many years ago.  Ruth sent me a copy of a poem she says I scrawled on half a sheet of torn-off notebook paper back in the late 70s.  I kind of liked the poem, but had no memory of writing it.  So I went into some site that identifies lines of poems and could find no matches.  I guess I did write it!  I’m going to sign off and go take some Norco and a couple of aspirin–I can’t take ibuprofen OR naproxen.

 

 

On Jan 31, 2014, at 9:38 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

My interest in NASCAR has been waning. In the old days, racing was justified as research–the front-edge safety and performance improvements would eventually trickle down to normal passenger cars, was the claim. But that stopped, and the cars instead were frozen in time, technologically, and the bureaucratic fussbudgets took over.  Passenger cars have all been fuel injected for twenty years, but until last year NASCAR insisted that all race cars use carburetors. 

 

The cars aren’t Fords and Chevys and Dodges now, they’re all the same machine with different cosmetic fiberglas exteriors, with “headlights” painted on. Winners on the track have their prize taken away when after-race disassembly of their engine reveals an exhaust valve lifter is .05mm different than authorized specifications. 

 

The big news this year is that the cars’ rear spoilers have been increased to 4.5″ to make cars more stable in traffic, and the ride-height rule has been altered to let the cars use springs and shocks that are more comfortable for the driver. 

 

Also, drivers must now signal before changing lanes. 

 

NASCAR has been busily brooming out the bad boys and the drivers now seem like PR-buffed clones.  Observers tsked when Danica Patrick got into a fistfight in the pits at the Brickyard 400, but I saw it as an indication that maybe she has the reckless gall to be a success on the track. 

 

Nuke’s interest has waned, too. He was rapt as a kitten, but after a while the cars seemed smaller and catchable, and now he just ignores them. 

 

 

Here’s your story synopsis. 

 

 

 

 

On Feb 3, 2014, at 9:58 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I liked Nuke’s Nascar pictures.  For me, racing is its own reward and doesn’t have to be justified.  No matter what the fussbudgets decree, they have not been able to take away the thrill of wheel-to-wheel racing.  That’s one reason Indy cars don’t do it for me.  “Real racecars have fenders….”  Sprint cars are exciting, too, but that’s because most of the drivers are insane.

 

Perhaps Nuke also realized that, even if he caught one of those noisy little cars, it wouldn’t be tasty.  

 

I am scattered this morning.  I have a 12:00 appointment with the endodontist, and the refrain of “Please, Mr. Custer….” keeps running through my head.  Perhaps I will be more organized and rational after my appointment–guess that depends on what he does.

 

Reading what I wrote about the Texas Tower killer was enlightening.  I was intellectually lazy enough not to get the name right (Charles Whitman), but some of the story lines would make interesting reading.  Something I didn’t address (maybe it hadn’t come to light then) was the fact that he had a brain tumor.  Years after the fact, the medical examiner said that DID affect his behavior.  So I guess the whole story idea is moot.  It’s harder to uncover the motives of spree killers, anyway. 

 

If I survive the dental appointment (haha i’m only half-kidding) I’ll be back in touch.

 

 


On Feb 4, 2014, at 8:56 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

 Obviously I survived.  The endodontist  took 4 more X-rays and told me he “didn’t predict a positive outcome from re-treating the tooth.”  In other words, more than 50% chance of failure in a year.  He recommended extraction, which I had already figured out was probably the best option.  I was ready to set up the appointment, but he said Oh, no.  The roots on that tooth are so long you’ll have to see an oral surgeon.  So…my regular dentist is supposed to call today with the name of the surgeon he recommends.  

 

Onward and upward….people in the Spokane area drive as if snow is some visitation from another world which they’ve never seen before.  One of our columnists said it best:  “Careful out there:/slick, you know./Had this last year:/it’s called snow.”  Jesse is having his troubles with the snow–there’s about 5-6 inches on the ground, and there’s been enough wind to put a light crust on it.  When he finally picks his spot, the increased pressure on his back legs makes him crunch through the crust and bury his little butt in the snow.  He is not amused, and implores me wordlessly

to find the door into summer…

 

Merry’s life does not change much winter to summer, but she appreciates the electric blanket being left on low when it’s really cold–like today–9 degrees when I took Jesse outside at 6:00 am.  It’s supposed to remain below 0 at night and teens during the day until Saturday.  Why do I live where it gets so cold in the winter?  I ask myself that question every winter, and a similar question every time the temperature climbs over 100 in the summer.  Kentucky, in general, seems to have a milder climate. 

I’m going to look at the figures from the weather service before I make any decision.

 

 

On Feb 4, 2014, at 5:53 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I don’t think it was your intellectual laziness as much as your haste to get the essentials written down while you were still dripping wet from the bathtub, pausing only long enough to insert another sheet of typing paper into the Underwood Upright, using only two periods more than Molly Bloom. 

 

No, it was physical laziness–you never used the shift key!  Once in a while on a bicycle ride I’ll see an old typewriter at a garage sale, and I ponder getting one for the Mad Max days that are sure to come, permanent power outages, but then I try typing a few words and my fingers say WHAT the FUCK are you THINKING???  And then I wonder how I’d make typewriter ribbons out of tree bark and cat hair, and I guess I’d just stick to pen and paper.

 

So, Wiseman, Whitman, something to be fact-checked but not bothered with during the heat of composition. Besides, how would you have checked it at that moment? As I recall, in Anaheim in 1969 our Internet connection was intermittent at best.

 

I saw a movie about the Texas Tower murders a few years ago, THE DEADLY TOWER (1975); it was from the point of view of the policeman who eventually shot Whitman. It would be politically incorrect to make the same movie today, as it includes a lot of private citizens pitching in with their own guns against Whitman and presents this as a good thing.

 

You didn’t say which tooth is acting up. I still have 26 teeth left, but my right incisor has recently told me, “Don’t bite down real hard on anything, buddy.” 

 

I stirred out of my hermit’s cave on Super Bowl Sunday and drove 50 miles north to Alameda, on the east shore of San Francisco Bay, to watch the big game with my pal Misha and his wife Maria. It was the first time I drove my car since Christmas, so naturally it was also the first day of rain here since Christmas and the freeway was jammed solid. 

 

I’ve known Misha since he was 18; I met him through the Santa Barbara BBS network in 1987.  BBSing was a wonderment for me: to get into it, you first of all had to be able to read and write, which left behind a significant fraction of the crowd right there, and then you had to have a computer and the smarts to figure out how to connect to the computer bulletin board system. Kind of like the amusement park rides with a height requirement. It wasn’t quite as strict as Mensa’s enrollment requirements, and some of the BBS crew were uber-brilliant assholes but it was a tremendous relief to find out not all of the next generation of  kids were idiots.

 

I still know a lot of those kids today. Misha is now 44 and is the head of internet security for Expedia.com/Hotwire.com.  He’s been there 12 years and last week he got an offer from Google to become their head of security. It’s tempting, he says, but he’s settled into a comfortable cocoon in his present life…he was a Navy brat, moving from base to base around the world with his father who was a code analyzer for the CIA. Misha was an early hacker and became a leading member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, the world’s foremost hacker organization in the 1990s. I attended four hacker conventions with him.  He and I fought in World War Two together. http://colin.org/Photos/2006Photos/BattleReenactment/Battle.html

 

His wife Maria is a graduate of MIT and works at the Web site of the Charles Schwab headquarters in San Francisco. I asked if she were going to be appearing in any operas this year–nope, there are hardly any roles for female extras in the upcoming season. Last summer she had minor roles in two plays–in one, her costume was a wig and a fig leaf, a tribute to her resolve to get back in shape. She was a discus thrower in college and resumed it in her 40s and has regained the cat-litheness of her youth.  She has not been able to overcome the heartbreak of being a Cleveland Indians fan as a child–we’re going to the Indians at SF Giants game on April 27.

 

Such strange people, though–about ten years ago they told me they were going to get one of those Japanese robot cats, it would be ideal for their erratic travel schedule, but I flooded them with emails explaining why real cats were a much better deal. They told me that my emails persuaded them to try a real cat, and now they are dedicated cat folks. 

 

However, their cats are all hide-under-the-bed types when visitors are around. I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture…I’ve only had a handful of cats, but every one of them has been of outgoing personality, first one to the door if a person comes visiting, oh, boy, another HUMAN!  

 

So anyhow we watched the boring Super Bowl, and another person showed up to watch the fourth quarter, another guy from the Santa Barbara BBS clique, John, a guy whose father was a satellite photo analyst for the US Geological Survey who’d worked with Misha’s father on classified projects. So classified that to this day they don’t know what their daddies were up to. He told me a story I hadn’t heard before: When John was 18 his mother and father abruptly left him in charge of their five-bedroom home in Santa Barbara and left for two years, sorry, can’t tell you where we’re going. They left him a stack of blank checks for the supermarket so he could buy food. After a while he, uh, abused the privilege and started writing the checks for more than the amount of the sale and pocketing the cash and buying drugs. And that’s why he was so spacey back in the BBS days. 

 

As far as Kentucky…I don’t know much about Kentucky weather, and I know even less about Spokane’s weather. All I need to know is that I’ve been snow-free ever since I’ve been in California, and I revel in it. I ride my bicycle year around, mostly in shorts & t-shirt like God intended. 

 

 

 

On Feb 6, 2014, at 10:33 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

AOL is having trouble loading all the messages attached to the old thread.  So let’s humor her and start a new one….

 

I tried typing on a friend’s old upright typewriter-HA!  That’s an exercise best left to someone with supple hands and wrists.  If you thought I never used the shift key before, you would see that anything I typed now would resemble the writings of e. e. cummings.  Pen & paper will have to do, come the revolution…..

 

I forget that there was no way to look up “stuff” back then.  And I think your characterization of our Internet connection in Anaheim is a few degrees off–I think it was imaginary.  I still retain my fascination with true crime–I keep thinking that the next book, the next story, will help me understand why people do such horrible things.  So far, I’m still in the dark.

 

This troublesome tooth is the next-to-last molar on the upper left, aka tooth #14.  My dentist’s office has not called with a recommendation for an oral surgeon.  I’m reluctant to call and prod because I know the reason for his absence is that he had to put his father into hospice care on January 27.  The antibiotic has calmed the pain down, so I can wait a few more days.  Besides that, who in their right mind would push for an appointment with a surgeon if they’re not in pain???

 

I enjoyed the Super Bowl.  I always enjoy the commercials, too.  This time it was kind of interesting to see Denver crumble.  I don’t follow football like I used to.  Walter Payton (Bears) was my favorite player of all time.

 

Spokane weather is similar to Michigan–Detroit and Spokane County are at roughly the same latitude.  However, Spokane is much drier.  Remember those 90-90 days in Michigan?  Here it’s more likely to be 90 degrees and 10% humidity.  Michigan has more violent thunderstorms; Spokane has a higher risk of wildfires.  I think Kentucky’s climate may just be milder in general.  I know they’ve had a couple of single degree days this winter, but those terrible storms have pretty much passed them by.

 

 

On Feb 9, 2014, at 11:46 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I don’t have the fascination with true crime…maybe it’s because I’ve been able to avoid bad people. I was talking about it with my sister Mary the other day (I phone her about once a month) and said that the only really bad guy I’ve ever known was our stepfather Pete, and she said the same thing.  I solved the problem by moving away from him when I was a teenager and I never saw him again, I mean never. Years later I learned what turmoil my sibs endured after I left, including sexual abuse. 

 

You mentioned that you had to deal with unsavory types in the line of duty with your job; I met a lot of repulsive folks in the ad biz but they were merely sad and dreary, not evil. Well, I did have one client who shot a guy outside a Santa Barbara restaurant…I knew the client was nuts, but I didn’t think he was violent. He was a music promoter and was trying to negotiate a venue for a Miles Davis concert and the owner of a venue had the gall to ask for a deposit first before he would reserve the venue for that date. So he laid in wait outside the restaurant and shot the guy when he came out. The guy lived, and I suppose the shooter is out of prison by now. 

 

I’ve only known one murderer, the guy I mentioned who carved up his father and grandmother. I would never have suspected him of evil–he was a brilliant guy and smelled bad, which turned out to be the odor of schizophrenia. Later I learned that the father was a brutal beater…his youngest sister Sarah told me that she grew up serene in the turbulent environment because her oldest brother was the lightning rod, she was protected by him. All the father’s rage was absorbed by David. 

 

The murders truncated the lives of all four sibs–not one of them has ever been able to establish a relationship. Another sister, Anna, told me that she couldn’t bring up the subject with a boyfriend, and she deflected questions about her dad, and that led to distancing. And then if she did tell a guy about it, “they decide I might be a murderer, too,” and vanished. 

 

One time their brother Joe asked me to go up into the mountains with him to test-fire his new lever-action .30-30. He was astonished at my skill at nailing milk jugs at 100 yards with it. I often wondered if that was a test, if he asked other people to see if they’d go up into the mountains with a crazed murderer’s brother with a gun. 

 

My fascination is with science and the history of technology. Right now I’m reading a biography of Galen, the Greek physician who moved to Rome in 159 to become doctor to the gladiators (each of whom cost as much as a top of the line SUV, today) and then became the personal doctor of emperor Marcus Aurelius (and several successor emperors although I’m not there yet in the narrative). His cures are all quackery (remedy for rabies: fennel harvested at midnight under a full moon) but his writings on anatomy remain sound. 

 

I don’t read fiction any more. Oh, maybe a Heinlein or MacDonald for comfort food, reliable old reads, once in a while. I don’t go to the movies except as social occasions with my younger friends, so I’ve seen many Star Wars-type movies, comic-book movies. I saw AVATAR with them and they were astonished that I didn’t like it…it’s a dead steal from Poul Anderson’s story “Call Me Joe”  from the April 1957 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, for one thing.  The only movie I’ve seen in the last ten years that I really liked was THE LIVES OF OTHERS, best foreign film Oscar in 2007. 

 

 

On Feb 12, 2014, at 2:00 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I was thinking about my interest in true crime–it has little to do with the people I encountered in the line of duty.  I remember reading “In Cold Blood” and “The Boston Strangler” when I was quite young and impressionable, and I seem to remember reading them in quick succession.  They scared me, and I think my drive to figure out killers came from that.  

 

Also, when I started this new thread, I forgot to mention the catly subject of nature-vs-nurture.  I know that Merry was a friendly kitty in her first life (her owner was friend of mine.)  After her owner died and her owner’s husband married a woman who had a Schnauzer she’d trained (!) to chase cats, poor declawed Merry was put outside to fend for herself.  I took her at age 8, terrified and defensive.  It took her 2 years to let me pet her without trying to bite me, and another couple years for her to sit on my lap.

Obviously nurture, or lack thereof, took over halfway through Merry’s life. 

 

Then there were the 2 Siamese that Richard and first wife Karen had raised from 7-week old kittens.  They were male littermates, neutered early, and they came into my life at 7 years old.  RC was reserved, weighed 12 pounds and loved sitting on laps.  KC was the flutterbug cat–never sat on a lap if he could sit on a shoulder or your head.  The first day I met the cats I was leaning against the dinette in an RV.  KC was perched across the aisle from me about 18 inches away.  All of a sudden he just launched himself at me, legs akimbo, and of course I caught him and helped him up to a perch on my shoulder.  Richard looked stunned, & said he’d never done that before.  KC came up with several “never done that before” behaviors in his life.

 

Well, enough about cats, I guess.  I don’t go to movies at the theater–if I really want to see one, I either buy it or wait until it comes on TV. Movies I have enjoyed lately: “The Shooter”, “RED” and the first Transformer movie–not terrible current, I know.  My favorite movie of all time is “Delta Force” 

 

Lately my reading has been skewed to gluten-free subjects.  I started a gluten-free diet to see if it made me feel better–which it did–but then discovered that, when I fell off the diet during the holidays, my auto-immune symptoms got worse.  Like psoriasis–under control when I eat gluten free, flares up when I go off the diet.  Guess I’ll be on it for the rest of my life.  I have since done some reading that quoted some studies that indicate it helps lupus, too. 

 

But when I’m not reading foodie stuff, I like my fiction.  I remember the first year when the lupus had affected my brain and I could only read one book at a time (instead of 3 or 4, remembering the page # of each one) and still got the details snarled at times.  I am grateful to be able to read one book now and keep the characters straight.  I still have trouble with large quantities of the printed word, such as forms.  By the end of the form, I’ve forgotten the beginning.  

 

 

On Feb 17, 2014, at 10:35 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’ve seen several recent studies talking about gluten being a fairly recent addition to the human diet that has not yet been completely adapted to. Akin to lactose tolerance, which is even more recent–less than 4,000 years of genetic change since the cows came home. 

 

My sister-in-law Nancy is currently on a gluten-free kick, but for her it’s just another in a long series of fads in quest of losing weight. I’m lucky enough to be an omnivore with an indifference toward food other than as fuel…I survive on steamed chicken, corn, potatoes, and broccoli, along with a Jumbo Jack now and again. Apples and oranges and bananas.  One ounce of raisins at bedtime…for some reason, Nuke is a maniac about raisins and pesters me for his share. 

 

When Matt raced in the Long Beach Grand Prix in 1981, he and I walked through the F1 garage area after hours the night before the race and looked at Mario Andretti’s car. Andretti’s team had a ramp with a scale under each wheel so they could adjust weights according to the banking of the particular track. Matt stood on one corner of the ramp and I stood on another, and we each weighed 154.7 pounds.  Today I’ve ballooned up to 160, but Matt is over 250 pounds and so is Nancy. 

 

Anyway. I’m paralyzed with inaction and my new home page is still blank. I’ve spent my life staring at a blank page and it’s blank because of all my shortcomings that I’d prefer to exclude from my Self Promotional Campaign.  Trying to explain exactly what I’m offering, an objective appraisal, and it all looks like horseshit. 

 

 


On Feb 18, 2014, at 7:42 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I don’t think it’s gluten that is the recent addition–it’s the Frankingluten that has been created as man tinkered with wheat to make it mature in a certain amount of time and make it stop growing at 12″, or 18″.  In increasing the yield and making it more convenient to harvest, glutens have been created that man has never had to digest before.  Both barley and rye have gluten, but wheat is the grain that has been messed with the most.  I’m not sure how gluten plays into the glycemic index, but I was shocked to learn that 2 slices of whole-wheat toast dump more sugar into your bloodstream faster than a cup of ice cream!!  I wish Nancy luck–gluten-free is hard to do.  I was also surprised to find out that soy sauce and Campbell’s tomato soup contain gluten…Thank goodness I am not lactose-intolerant–I drink a gallon of low-fat milk every 7 to 10 days.

 

You didn’t ask for advice, so I won’t give it.  What I will tell you is what sometimes worked for me.  When I was in that horrible paralytic state where it seemed like I couldn’t even spell “it,” and I had to come up with something on deadline, I’d sit down and start typing.  Not quite free associating, because I would try to stay on subject.  Before long, there’d be a sentence that made sense, and then another and so on.  Stand behind yourself, and point out good things.  Oops, I guess that’s advice.  Oh well, we’re mature enough to reject it or accept it.  Anyway, good luck.

 

 

 

 

On Feb 24, 2014, at 3:58 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’ve been catatonic for a week. Can’t bring myself to do anything because it will just be more proof of my incompetence, etc. 

 

The perfect is the enemy of the good. 

 

The main barrier in my path is my realization that I must go public.  I must begin continuously posting new messages on my home page in order to attract attention. Creating this one new page is not the problem, exactly, it’s that I must readjust my whole life. 

 

I hopped in my private time machine and went back to January 1988, when I first began my on-line career, and read about my trepidation as I slowly worked up my courage to post stuff on the BBS network. It was extremely hard to force Colin the Hermit into such action. Then I slowly became the most well-known contributor in Santa Barbara. 

 

So. The page I am laboring over is just the opening shot.  Any nanosecond now and I’ll be able to get it going. 

 

 

 

On Feb 26, 2014, at 7:12 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Ugh–I know catatonic.  It’s like wearing a cement overcoat and knowing that no one can help you get out of it.  I can only speak for me, but my periods? attacks? of catatonia have had nothing to do with my bi-polar disorder.  Different animal entirely.

 

More to the point, the perfect is the enemy of progress.

 

You have more nerve than I do–I’m having daily hissy fits about readjusting my whole life.  One minute I’m convinced I CANNOT leave this house, and literally the next moment I’m thinking, well of course I should move to Kentucky.  I’m sure you will eventually get things moving in the right direction.  For the first time in eons, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  Rat poop and vermin piss.  I am NOT used to being indecisive.

 

One thing that isn’t helping is that I had to stop taking my gingko biloba in preparation for oral surgery next Tuesday, because of the risk of excessive bleeding.  I know studies have shown it doesn’t improve memory, but what it does for me is improve my retrieval.  It sharpens my mental acuity, and being off it means that I feel like a dinner knife instead of a chef’s knife.

 

 

On Feb 28, 2014, at 12:12 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I haven’t tried ginko biloba. I’ve been taking ginseng, which gives me ineffable verve, or maybe it’s a placebo, who knows. I formerly was on Vitamin C, D, and E kicks, at various times, but I’ve set that aside. 

 

And now there are floods of reports that all supplements are harmful. One thing I’ve learned is that if one expert says something today, another expert will have a contradictory report tomorrow. Next: the tragic consequences of oxygen addiction.

 

I saw Kentucky in the news the other day in a listing of “Best States To Live In;” it was tied with West Virginia at 49th. I didn’t read the article to find out what their criteria were after I saw that the leading #1 state to live in was North Dakota. 

 

My catatonia is a subset of the multiple-bale jackass syndrome, in which a donkey starves to death equidistant from two piles of hay. I have all kinds of projects on my desk, each one more important than the next, and I dither and can’t focus on any particular project because now all my other projects seem more important.

 

Then some switch gets flipped and suddenly I’m producing all kinds of stuff. I’m powerless to flip the switch myself. 

 

I haven’t kept up on the list of disorders. I don’t know if I’m bi-polar or not, or any of the other endlessly expanding diagnoses.  I’m remembering a cartoon of a woman’s first visit to the psychiatrist; she’s saying, “Doctor, I’m filled with this nameless dread,” and the shrink says, “Don’t worry, my dear, we have a name for everything.” 

 

For a while in the 70s and early 80s I studied various shrinkologies. I gravitated toward the Thomas Szasz axis of THE MYTH OF MENTAL ILLNESS. I shared my office with an art director who was an ardent Jungian, so I read a lot of Jung.  

 

Mostly my disorder is hubris. I’m so fantastically terrific, etc, but then on the down days I realize I can’t possibly be as terrific as I think I am, I’m nothing but a poseur. 

 

I was terribly afraid of strange dogs in the night, and I despised myself for that fear, and one school of thought said that you can fight fears by confronting them. I thought it was Rogerian therapy, but I looked it up on the Web just now and that doesn’t sound like the one that influenced me. I read so much stuff…anyway, I decided that to cure myself I would start carrying a knife and a resolve: I would kill the next dog that attacked me, if necessary I would shove my left arm down the down the dog’s throat up to my elbow and let him bite me until I could get my knife out and chop him to death. 

 

I didn’t have a car in those days in Santa Barbara and had to walk everywhere, and one midnight a big yellow dog stepped into my path and growled. Okay, I said, after all my brave talk, here is the actual situation. Don’t quiver and run, do it! And I pulled my knife and stepped forward–and the dog fled. Since then, dogs easily read my intent and don’t bother me. They don’t want to die. 

 

So that’s how I cured caninophobic disorder. 

 

 

On Mar 3, 2014, at 8:33 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

We both spelled ginkgo wrong–I try to remind myself there’s a “go” in ginkgo.  I started taking it in the mid-90s after buying a book (my usual approach to starting anything new) and discovering that, first of all, doctors in Europe have been prescribing it for decades.  Second, the dose being suggested at that time by the supplement vendors, 60 mg/day, was woefully inadequate for adults.  The European standard at that time called for an starting dose of 200 – 250 mg/day.  I take 240 mg per day, and the supplement makers have since upped their suggested dose, some to 120/day, some to 240.

 

I take vitamin D, as it has an anti- inflammatory effect and lupus symptoms often involve inflammation.  I take vitamin E because it relieves the symptoms of fibrocystic breast disease.  I also started a supplement with Omega 3s, CoQ10 and resveratrol (the antioxidant also found in red grapes) about 10 months ago.  Unfortunately, it lowered my cholesterol to 100(!), which is a tad too low.  My doctor had suggested the supplement, but I had to cut it in half.  I try to take only what I need and what works for me, which is why I don’t take a multi.  This concludes the Supplement Section of our broadcast.

 

Colin, if you were truly bi-polar, you would know, or at least you would know something was TERRIBLY

wrong.  I ripped a co-worker a new one for saying she “felt a little bi-polar today.”  This is not a disorder of the month, nor is it anything anyone should wish to have.  It is a serious mental illness that can literally cleave one’s soul in half, alienate everyone around you and drop you into the deepest hell you can imagine.  That is, if you don’t get treatment.  I am very careful about taking my lithium and my quetiapine.

 

I’m going in for the tooth extraction tomorrow.  Bleah…..

 

 

On Mar 6, 2014, at 9:13 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I hope your extraction went smoothly and is fading fast from memory. 

 

I wasn’t trying to imply that bipolarity is a “disorder of the month.” After I studied shrinkologies, I concluded that I didn’t fit any of the listed psychoses, as far as requiring professional intervention. So I’m not nuts, I’m just lazy, and smart enough to get away with it. Usually.  

 

My problem is that I live in the world of the written word. I saw a quote from George R R Martin today, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” 

 

Maybe my retreat into reading was a result of my chaotic childhood. I become completely deaf when I am absorbed in reading, which really helps when the house is filled with loud shouting arguments all the time. By clicking the heels of my eyeballs together, I could transmit myself to a sinking cargo ship in the South China Sea where the only survivors to struggle ashore were me and The Black Stallion. 

 

It didn’t occur to me that my childhood life was unusual, not until later in life when I discovered that hardly anybody else’s mother was a motorcycle club mama. And only recently have I concluded that maybe the reason that she hated me was that I was so much like my father. 

 

Sometimes I have manic creative spells, but they are rationally induced and without the extreme let-downs of bad mania.  Typically they happen as the crest of a process after studying the client’s request and after cramming myself with tons of info, I’m finally able to burst out with a coherent sequence and everything falls into place. For me, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. 

 

Usually it takes me years to write my stories, but I had a manic two-day burst when I wrote “Dark Vision” in response to an on-line essay contest. I’d been absorbed in reading gold sites and owned 20 ounces of gold, and when a site had a contest for a prediction about our bleak future, I started writing and writing and kept waking up in the middle of the night with another new piece that would fit right in, yes, and then I finished it and emailed it and even though I made it an epistolary fiction instead of an essay, I won first prize. Which was a half ounce of gold. 

 

Spinning real-world gold out of imaginary dreams, yeah, sure is nice work when I can get it. 

 

http://colin.org/Fiction/DarkVision.html 

 

 

On Mar 11, 2014, at 6:31 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Did you get my e-mail of March 3

 

 

On Mar 12, 2014, at 7:54 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Another message floating around in the ether….My extraction went smoothly–I guess.  The surgeon put me to sleep with Fentanyl and Versed:  Fentanyl for pain and Versed for forgetfulness.  It worked.  My last memory before the extraction is the Versed being introduced into my IV, and I remember nothing until I was sitting in my friend’s car outside the pharmacy while she filled my prescriptions.  Better than being awake, but it is disconcerting to know that I walked and talked and interacted with people and can’t remember any of it.

 

I liked “Dark Vision”–you have a knack for projecting current trends into future possibilities.  And–it’s cool that you won a half ounce of gold!  

 

To paraphrase your self-talk: I’m not lazy, I’m just nuts and smart enough to get away with it.  Usually.

A psychiatrist could have a field day with that, I’m sure.

 

I also read voraciously.  There was a time (before my lupus symptoms were treated) when reading was a laborious process.  That was the worst–I took to making lists of characters as I read, because if I put the book down for more than an hour, I couldn’t remember which person did what.  That is possibly the worst sentence, grammatically, I’ve ever written.  

 

Sorry I didn’t get your message in a timely fashion–the only place I didn’t check was “spam”, as I delete those messages every day without looking at them.   And I apologize for ranting a bit about bi-polar disorder.

 

 

On Mar 13, 2014, at 7:48 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Huh, an IV for dental anesthetic…I had some kind of gas the day I had my wisdom teeth ripped out, but everything else has been just local. Nevertheless, I don’t remember a goddam thing about any of my dental work, it’s fiercely stuffed into the forget-it box. 

 

I had many drunk blackouts in my drinking days, but the oddest one was a Quaalude blackout. The one and only Quaalude I’ve ever taken in my life. Somebody gave me one in Santa Barbara, and so one evening at home I swallowed it, and then woke up in bed the next morning with no memory of anything. I hadn’t left the apartment or done anything, didn’t walk and talk and interact with people. Just ten hours snipped out of my life.  Wow, what a high. 

 

Reminds me of the time Tommy Parshall’s son was pulled over by the cops for some traffic infraction; the kid was using daddy’s car for a Saturday night date. The cops asked him to open the trunk, and he said, “My dad doesn’t give me the key to the trunk,” and so the cops crowbarred open the trunk and found cases and cases of Quaaludes and they hauled the kid off to jail. Suure your dad’s a salesman for Rohrer Pharmaceuticals…

 

I heard unsavory stories of Tom using Quaaludes as a date-rape drug…he called me out of the blue ten or fifteen years ago because he was in the Bay Area to attend some child or grandchild’s graduation from Stanford, and we had dinner. 

 

He brought a cassette tape that he recorded one night at his house. You were on it. 

 

I was doing a “relentless interviewer” thing and I asked you which President in American history was the biggest dick, and you said, “Well, if we’re going by monuments, it has to be Washington.”  

 

Mary’s guy Ray Faust was there and I asked him about his pet fox, and he revealed that he’d been forced by the state game commission to either release it or kill it, so he shot the fox; Scott and I instantly improvised a blues tune, Scott inventing something on Tommy’s grand piano and me singing the lyrics for THIS OLD FOX WAS A FRIEND OF MINE. 

 

Then Tommy left and took the tape and I never heard from him again, although I sent him Christmas cards for a few years. 

 

 

I finally was able to lash myself into creating a new home page for www.colin.org and it went live yesterday. And today I added the first daily post. The right-hand column will have something new each day, that’s the goal.  Next I’ll probably use that numbskull site I showed you, Agilone. 

 

 

On Mar 16, 2014, at 6:54 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I was surprised about the IV anesthetic, too, but the oral surgeon said he would not recommend nitrous oxide and Novocain in my case because I’m totally freaked out about dental procedures, and because the root of the tooth was very long.  So I took the anesthetic.  I’m so wary of dental work that my regular dentist uses nitrous oxide when I have my teeth cleaned.

 

Are Mary and Ray still together?  I remember his fox stealing cigarette packs out of pockets.  I’m glad you told me what’s on that tape that Tommy Parshall had–I always considered him a perv of the first order, though he never approached me.  One thing that convinced me he was sexually awry is that I overheard him talking about large blow-ups of female parts that were displayed inside locker doors–somewhere.  It doesn’t surprise me that he would use Quaaludes as a date rape drug. 

 

I never understood the appeal of downers–they used to be called “gorilla pills.”  All they ever did was make me sleep.  “Sleepy gorilla” pills…

 

I checked out your new home page–direct and punchy.  You should get some results from that.  

 

 

 

On Mar 19, 2014, at 5:31 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Mary and Ray spent ten years in the golden paradise of Provo, Utah, where Mary was the only smoking, drinking, non-Mormon girl living in sin in the county. A permanent cold shoulder from the locals, and Ray slowly devolved toward his ideal: the Robert Redford character in JEREMIAH JOHNSON, him and his gun vs. the varmints in the wilderness. He went years between showers and never brushed his teeth. 

 

She finally got sick of that and moved to California and married a guy in Santa Barbara who owned a solar heating business, but then the State subsidy ended and every solar heating company went out of business. They drank and bickered for six years before divorcing. She moved back to Detroit and worked as a mortgage underwriter and rose to become a partner in the company before being forced out for her refusal to condone liar loans. She hasn’t worked since, a leper in the industry and with her own home underwater now, but her former partners are in jail for fraud and she’s not. 

 

She has a boyfriend in Detroit who is an x-ray technician but he doesn’t bathe either. I have to make sure to let him sit first at family dinners so I can get the seat farthest away from him, pheww. 

 

Tommy Parshall coerced sex from Heidi Schumacher for a while with some kind of blackmail, I never knew the details. Put out or he’d rat her out. Maybe it was more of her burglary, or maybe drug deals, who knows, I didn’t want to know. Heidi moved to [Pennsylvania] and  lost several fingers off one of her hands in a job accident, that’s the last I heard of her. 

 

Yeah, i never saw the appeal of downers, either.  I dabbled with amphetamines for a while…in 1979 I drove from Detroit to Santa Barbara while taking MDMA that Mark gave me, what a wild trip, with lightning storms pacing me all the way.  But that was a one-off. The hackers I got involved with in the mid-90s were into MDMA under its newer street name of Ecstasy, or X, and I tried it a couple times but the thrill was gone. 

 

I haven’t posted the next update to my site yet. Instead I’ve been picking away at the code to make the pages look better…a stalling technique, because one thing I’ve found out is that most of the adbiz types I’m trying to talk to would have no idea how to look at the source code of a Web page. They only care what the surface looks like. It’s stalling, because what I need to do is start sending personal emails to the hundreds of shops on my emailing list and entice them into taking a look at my new home page. 

 

Thanks for the upcheck on my page. Now I have to show it to the world. 

 

On Mar 21, 2014, at 7:29 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Nah, she wasn’t the only one.  It probably just felt like that to her.  I’ve met people from Utah, and they are not all devout Mormons by a long shot.  What do you call people from Utah?  Utahians?  Utahites?  I’ve got it–Uptights!  I’ve also known people who were less than conscientious about their personal hygiene–how do they expect anyone to stomach getting close to them?  Maybe they have a death wish and really want to mate with a bear….

 

Tommy Parshall’s coercion of Heidi just proves to me that he is not only a pervert, but a stupid one.  Who in their right mind would expose themselves to the array of characters that have probably 

passed through Heidi’s life?

 

I have been having EXTREMELY vivid dreams here lately.  I wake up feeling as if I have physically experienced the events of the dreams.  Much of the activity is far beyond my real-world capabilities.  I keep having a recurring dream that I am in San Francisco (?) and I have forgotten where I parked my car.  I’m dressed in a sleeveless shift (never) and barefoot (also never.)  The dream always starts at the top of Lombard St. and seems to go on and on and on, building panic with every street corner.  That dream ends when I wake up.  Other dreams go on to a resolution.  If I wake up during one of them, I pick up right where I left off when I go back to sleep.  

 

I think I’m just stressed about the go/no-go to Kentucky decision.  I’m no closer to a decision than I was the last time I mentioned it.  Good luck with your e-mails.  I think I’m going to go take a nap–hopefully without dreams!

 

 

On Mar 23, 2014, at 1:16 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I rarely remember my dreams these days. Back when I was reading about Jungianism I tried writing down my dreams, but that led nowhere. Jackson Pollock did the Jung thing and wrote down his dreams and that led to his breakthrough of dripping paint at random on his canvases. 

 

I tried lucid dreaming after reading Richard Feynman’s instructions in SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN. It worked pretty well, but it led to nothing much and I gave it up. It was fun for a brief time to be able to ride a cloud and steer it where I wanted while also knowing it was a dream…conscious interaction with your dream…but, so what? The heck with it, let’s just sleep. 

 

I had a strange dream when I was living in a boarding house in Santa Barbara long ago…my brother and I were tending cattle on the savanna, it was hot and dry and dusty but it was fun even though we had to watch out for lions. I woke up and walked to work thinking about those old days when I was a kid in Africa, savoring all the memories, and then about half a mile into my walk I thought, wait a minute, when was I ever in Africa? The dream persisted while I was awake, I guess. 

 

Then that evening when I came home from the office I gave the landlady the rent check and she was all abuzz about something, very unusual. What’s going on, I said. “Oh, my son and his wife and little boys are visiting, they got here yesterday, we haven’t seen them for years, they’ve been on a missionary outreach in Africa.” 

 

Coincidence? Telepathy? Subconsciously interpreted clues? Who knows.

 

What are the hard parts of the Kentucky decision? Do you make lists of pros and cons? I always try to think things out, and then go off kiyoodling on some harebrained impulse without a plan or thought of consequences. 

 

For me the California weather trumps just about everything else. I live in shorts and t-shirts and bicycle everywhere. If I wanted snow I could drive a couple hours into the mountains…but I prefer to keep “winter” a theoretical thing seen only on TV. 

 

 

 

 

On Mar 28, 2014, at 6:10 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Thinking things out is the problem, I guess.  The hardest part would be leaving my home of 27 years.  Some of the best parts of my adult life have been spent here–some of the worst parts, too. 

 

Speaking of worst parts, I went out in the garage after I started this reply and fell and hurt my back.  I can barely sit comfortably, so this very brief message is to let you know I got your e-mail of 3/23 and will be replying at greater length when I can sit in a chair more comfortably. 

 

 

On Mar 29, 2014, at 10:09 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Oops–sent this to myself, so had to forward it to you.

—–Original Message—–
From: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>
To: msrnmorley <msrnmorley@aol.com>
Sent: Sat, Mar 29, 2014 10:08 am
Subject: Re:

I still can’t sit in a chair, but I have a wooden 2-step stool that’s very sturdy, so I put a little pillow on top and I can sit on that for a while, anyway.  Leaning forward is the most comfortable position.  Amazing how dependent I have become on my computer–not only did I have e-mail to answer, but I have banking to do this morning.  I don’t have a laptop or a smart phone, so I had to figure out a way to sit comfortably in front of my desktop.

 

The best part of moving to Kentucky would be seeing Jim more often.  He calls me every weekend, and we are probably closer than most siblings who live in the same town.  I’m just afraid that Jennifer would come to resent me after a while.  Jim and I can have a conversation that just hits the peaks while everyone else is slogging through the valleys.  We can also volley puns back and forth so fast that we’re on number 15 while most people are trying to figure out number 1.  Oh hell, I think she resents me already.  She’s very jealous, and I think that extends to anyone who spends time with Jim.  And I think that if I were to mention this to Jim, he would deny it–wouldn’t believe that she feels that way.  Men have as many blind spots as women do….

 

Took a short break and did some stretches–that seems to help a bit.  Aspirin also helps, though my doctor shudders when I tell him I limit them to 6 per day.  I have to remind him regularly that ibuprofen and naproxen sodium tear holes in my stomach, and acetaminophen is about as effective as walking outside and letting the sun shine in my mouth.  Hydrocodone works, but only the lowest dose combined with the lowest dose of acetaminophen is tolerable to my stomach.

 

Your Africa dream was interesting–I don’t think I’ve ever had one last that long after I woke up.  After Richard died, I would have dreams about just everyday life with him still alive, and in that just-waking-up fog I would think the dream was real.  Putting an arm around a big hairy German Shepherd is the textbook definition of a rude awakening.  Those dreams thankfully went away after a few months.

 

If I were to choose a place to live based on weather, it would probably be Hoquiam, Washington, or thereabouts.  I believe they get around 90 inches of rain per year.  You never have to shovel it, and my lupus would stay quiescent as long as the sun didn’t shine.

 

On Apr 1, 2014, at 1:02 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Hope your back is feeling better.  Surprisingly, although I had chronic and acute back problems when we were together, since then I have never had a single twinge again. Must have been all your fault. 

 

The doctors advised me not to participate in sports because of the danger of paraplegia from my congenital deformity of the spine, and they recommended surgery, but instead I devised my own exercises and played ball and bicycled. My theory was to develop enough muscle to overcome the problems of the missing vertebra. 

 

So far I’m still pretty darned athletic. 

 

I can still enter into a close rapport with my sibs. I phone Mary once a month. Scott does not answer his phone and does not return calls, but every once in a while he needs something from me and calls, and we fall into easy conversation as though we saw each other yesterday. I visit Matt in Santa Barbara all the time but we mostly talk about car topics. I spend a lot more time talking to his wife Nancy, who is ready to gossip until dawn. 

 

I have hardly any contact with my half-sibs. I get along fine with Andy Antonian, who is a self-employed stonemason in Oklahoma, but I get the shudders around Gina, who has faithfully replicated my mother’s child-rearing and home-care methodologies; her three children get checks for being autistic and that’s the way she likes it. 

 

My half-sister Carole was an only child and has alienated us Campbells. We are awful because we don’t live the way she would prescribe. People shouldn’t be wild and creative like our daddy was. She’ll list all our flaws for us but she has special venom for me, I don’t know why. 

 

Nobody knows what dreams are and I don’t bother myself about them. Nothing you can do about them. Twenty years ago I had a lunch with an ad agency guy to discuss the final details of a brochure I was writing, and a guy from the printing company showed up for the lunch. All he wanted to talk about was the dream he’d had the night before about his mother, whom he’d never dreamed about before; she’d been dead a long time. “I’ll be seeing you,” she told him in the dream. 

 

The next day the ad agency guy called me to say the guy from the printing shop dropped dead of a heart attack a few hours after our lunch. 

 

On the other hand, a few days after my sister Lanie died, Mary had a long vivid dream in which Lanie appeared and pointed a bony finger at Mary and said “You’re next!”

 

That was 13 years ago. I don’t know if Mary is still on tenterhooks. 

 

My cat is famished, suddenly. He’s gone 8.5 years being mostly indifferent to food, food is always there, no big deal, but the last few days he’s been cleaning his wet-food dish and begging for more. This morning for the first time ever he was waiting by his food dish. 

 

Since I repaired the scratch post, by the way, he still will not scratch on the new-fangled replacement rope and scrupulously stays below that part. 

 

 

On Apr 3, 2014, at 8:24 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

My back is slowly improving.  I had an appointment with my internist already scheduled for April 1, so I asked him about it then. He says it’s probably a bruised ishial bursa and will just have to heal on its own. I can use heat and do stretches, but he said the best treatment would be for me to stay upright–everybody’s a comedian. 

 

Nuke may be developing hyperthyroidism.  I speak from personal experience, as RC did the very same thing–started eating everything in sight and begging for more.  He was a bit older than Nuke, almost 11, but cats are very prone to the condition.  We took RC to Washington State University Veterinary Hospital and had him treated with radioactive iodine and then gave him liquid medicine every day.  He never had any problems after that. I don’t know what to say about the scratching post–cats are just weird about “their” things.

 

Your back problems must have been my fault–I agree.  Must have been that anti-Fran Brown curse I put on you…………

 

I did not intend to be so brief, but sitting is still difficult. I’ve graduated from the step stool to cushions in my desk chair, but I am increasingly uncomfortable.  Time for a pain pill and the futon.

 

 

On Apr 5, 2014, at 7:13 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Stay upright and be a stand-up comedian!  

 

I tried comedy for a while. I performed with the Santa Barbara improv group, Zero Gravity Theater, for a few years in the 80s. I was just a second banana, not a name on the flyers I made for the group. 

 

One night at the peak of our fame, though, we had a show at a larger venue, there must have been 700 people in the audience, and something about my wry understatement tickled the audience that night. We had a genuwine old-fashioned Applause Meter and at the end of the evening each of us performers were introduced and I got the biggest applause rating and so I won first prize, which was dinner for two at the trendiest Santa Barbara restaurant. Some of the other players were miffed, but that’s show biz. It was the biggest prize ever in Zero Gravity history. 

 

I’ve been thinking about what you said about realizing that you had been gravitating toward men who were similar to your stepfather, and maybe that’s what was going on with me and Linda. She would never debase herself by attending any of the shows in which I performed, but she was quite eager to have a meal at the trendiest restaurant in town the next Saturday night. Surf and turf for the both of us, but then the evening turned sour for her because four or five other people in the restaurant came over to our table to congratulate me. After the third or fourth interruption by well-wishers, she said, “But, but, these people really like you!” She was remote and icy with me the rest of the night. 

 

She was that way about everything: if I did well at it, it was therefore inconsequential. I played in a couple hundred league softball games during our relationship, and she attended one of them, a championship playoff final game. As it turned out, I made several crucial plays in the game and we won the trophy and my teammates voted me MVP of the playoffs. But Linda wasn’t there: the other teammate wives and girlfriends in the stands told me she left in the second inning. 

 

It’s not the same as your situation with your stepfather, a rejection of intimacy rather than an imposition of intimacy. But I hadn’t previously seen the parallels between her and my mother, who remained impervious to my accomplishments to her dying day.  

 

Meanwhile, my recent accomplishment of putting up a new home page brought in a sudden project. Yesterday I went to a Silicon Valley chip company to talk to their marketing director about something or another, it wasn’t quite clear what they wanted, and instead of one guy it was a conference with  the marketing director along with the company president and their top 10 engineers; they’re attending a venture-capital convention in Florida on May 6 and want to make a presentation to get $25 million in funding for something or another. 

 

They have come to the conclusion that the millionaires are not likely to bite at the slogan they were thinking of using: 

 

“CMICs enable innovative designers to differentiate their hardware utilizing Standard Platform SoCs”

 

So it’s up to me to distill this into a glistening hypnotic message that will make the millionaires reach for their checkbooks. 

 

Meanwhile, back in the cat universe, Mary had to put down her 13-year-old, Joey, yesterday: stomach cancer. 

 

I called her today and distracted her from her grief with balderdash about other topics. I also told her about my pal Rhea, tough-gal third baseman on my most recent softball team, who was terribly concerned about her cat Zoe, she’d never seen the cat act like this, and she took Zoe to the vet and discovered that Zoe had come down with heat.  That’s what the vet said, she’s in heat. Rhea is in her 30s but she had never heard that term. She had the cat surgically treated to end the threat. 

 

 

On Apr 8, 2014, at 6:54 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Of all the things I might have thought about you doing, stand-up comedy wasn’t even in the universe.  Not that I don’t think you’d be good at it–I do.  I think the reason it would never have occurred to me is that the prospect terrifies ME.  When I was a member of a statewide task force on officer training, I had to speak several times in front of audiences numbering anywhere from 50 to 300.  I was a basket case every time, though people told me I did just fine.  At least I could stand at the podium and realize that since we were breaking new ground, I knew more about my subject than most of the people in my audience.  I cannot imagine standing in front of a crowd and trying to make them laugh.

 

I do okay telling a story to one or two friends.  As a matter of fact, you are in one of the stories I tell people.  One Friday after work, you came to my office to meet me and 8-10 of my co-workers for a drink.  I got delayed by a last-minute taxpayer, so you and everyone else went on to the bar.  Don’t remember the name of it, but it had just been remodeled.  There was a new dance floor 2 steps up from the entry level, and the remodelers had neglected to put the bulbs in the little lights on the risers that would have shown me the new steps.  I saw everyone in the far corner and set out with my usual stride, only to fall face down with a resounding boom! on the new dance floor.  My shoes flew off and everything exited my purse.  Ever supportive, you yelled “Cut her off!”  Stand-up ambitions even then?

 

My heart goes out to Mary–it’s so hard to put down a pet, even if you know it’s the right thing for them.  I wind up second-guessing myself every time.  Joey was a beautiful cat.  Speaking of cats, I was intrigued by your account of Rhea.  If she ever wants a baby, do you suppose she will check out all the lily pads in the area?  Or maybe the nearest stork farm?  

 

Merry is royally pissed at me right now.  Just before I sat down at the computer, I went to my recliner with my container of yogurt in hand, and she was standing in the seat with her front paws on the arm.  NORMALLY, all I have to do is say “Move, Merry” and she jumps up on the arm.  I foolishly counted on her to do that, and she didn’t move.  I was already in the irreversible process of sitting down, so I reached down and put my palm under her butt and whisked her out of the way, up onto the arm.  It was a pretty sudden move, and she prefers calm seas.  So she hissed at me, puffed her tail and jumped off the chair.  Then she stomped out of the living room and I’m sure she’s curled up with her stuffed tiger on the bed.

 

Once again, my back is limiting how much I have to say.

—–Original Message—–

 

On Apr 10, 2014, at 2:37 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I hasten to add that I didn’t do stand-up comedy, that’s a whole different thing than improv.  There were several stand-up wannabees in the Zero Gravity ensemble, and they’re the ones with their names on the flyer. They were tiresome egomaniacs, mostly, and I didn’t get along much with them. So it pleasured me when they were miffed that the audience gave me the prize. 

 

In Improv, the audience shouts out suggestions and the players riff on the situation. Spontaneous creation rather than a labored pre-set standup routine. 

 

My half-sister Carole worked for a while at the Playboy Channel as a production accountant and one part of her job was to go to Los Angeles comedy clubs and scout the talent–the Playboy Channel had 168 hours a week of air-time to fill, and comedians work cheap. I went with her one time after she’d been doing it three or four times a week for six months, and by that time, she told me, “Nothing is funny.”  Everybody fell into categories. Fat person = fat jokes. My Painful Childhood jokes. I’m An Airhead Doper jokes. Bald = bald jokes. 

 

Sweaty desperation and barely a chuckle. It was the era where everybody was trying to be the next Pee Wee Herman.

 

I haven’t spoken before audiences very much, except in the presentation of ad campaigns to the CEO and/or the Board of Directors of a company. I relished those situations because I too knew we were breaking new ground and I knew more about the campaign and the product than anybody else in the room. 

 

 

I don’t recall the bar-room dance floor incident, but it sounds like something I’d say in a sports context.  I might have yelled that if a softball teammate tripped while entering the bar where we gathered after the game. 

 

Yesterday I met with the braintrust of Silego, a chip company. They want to be known as the greatest manufacturer of CMIC chips in the world. Nobody else makes CMIC chips. Nobody knows what CMIC chips are. The company declines to inform you what CMIC chips are.  But saying “CMIC chips are disruptive” is supposed to be enough to make pension funds get out their checkbooks and buy the upcoming IPO.  I’m probably going to get fired off this job. 

 

Now I’m away to another client meeting, a new ad agency that doesn’t have a staff writer. I’m to discuss two projects today: a Web page for a hypnotist who cures bed-wetters, and a Web page for a company that bills itself as The Bay Area Flooring Leader.  If you Google “Bay Area Flooring Leader” you find dozens of different companies claiming that very same title.  Their existing Web site tells you that they have everything, but if you click on anything to find out more,  you are told the only way to find out about that is to come into our convenient local showroom between the railroad tracks and the community sewage pond. 

 

The sewage pond is along my usual bicycle route along the Los Gatos Creek trail, so I stopped in at the floor shop on today’s ride and looked at exotic hardwoods and learned enough to make an interesting new page for the company.  Of course, it’ll probably turn out that all they want to do is make a page about some employee’s 25th anniversary with the company, and a new photo of the owner.

 

 

On Apr 13, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Improv sounds scarier than stand-up.  You will never catch me trying to do either one, and you can take that to the bank!  

 

Trust me.  The barroom dance floor incident happened–it’s one of my very clearest memories.  Other incidents involving my klutz self are also very clear; perhaps embarrassment sharpens the recollection?

 

I woke up at 6:00 this morning to an awful sound I couldn’t identify–it turned out to be poor little Merry trying to breathe.  She sounded awful, and I could hear her two rooms away.  I took just enough time to drink a cup of coffee, eat a piece of toast and take my pills.  Then I threw on some sweats and a turban, stuffed Merry in her crate and drove 24 miles to the Pet Emergency Clinic.  Thankfully the doctor said her heart sounded fine and she just had some congestion in her chest.  She didn’t have a fever, but he prescribed 7 days of antibiotics for her.  If that doesn’t clear it up, I’m to take her to her regular vet.  Scary stuff so early in the morning.  It is really comforting to know that there is a place to go when your regular vet isn’t in.  She had one dose of antibiotics this morning at the clinic, and she hasn’t eaten anything today.  If that doesn’t change, I might take her in tomorrow anyway.

 

I just went to check on her–she’s sitting on her brisket on the bed, so I took a little handful of her food out of her bowl and put it in front of her.  We’ll see if that works. 

 

Your prospective clients sound interesting, to say the least.  Why won’t these people define what their CMIC chips do?  How is anyone supposed to buy them?  Maybe they should rename them PIP chips– 

pig in a poke chips.  Good luck.

 

 

On Apr 16, 2014, at 12:01 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I wasn’t trying to say the barroom dance floor incident didn’t happen, just that I don’t remember it.  Being  back in contact with you has proven to me that my memory is a self-serving sieve. I thought I had a barrel full of memories from our days together, but when I take the lid off and look in, the bottom is a mirror an inch from the top. 

 

I don’t have any memories of you being a klutz. Far from it. Rhonda the Adept. 

 

I didn’t get fired from the CMIC company. Yet.  They rejected everything we presented on Monday; last night I wrote an 1,100-word precis of what I think it is that the company is trying to say. Tomorrow we’ll show it, and then I’ll get fired. 

 

The way I go about writing text for companies is to phrase everything in terms of concrete nouns and active verbs. Companies don’t like that, because they prefer to couch their message in vague abstractions so they can’t be pinned down. 

 

Nobody will read the vague abstractions. Well, wait, the company’s employees will read it and say yessir boss, it’s great. It’s frustrating for the companies, because it’s *true* that their product “enables innovative configurable solutions.” 

 

But that doesn’t tell you anything about what the company does, unless you already know everything the company does. 

 

Meanwhile, I wrote a blog post for the hypnotist, or rather edited it into a reader-friendly format and coded it for presentation on the Web page. The agency likes it and now we’ll find out if the client likes it. “Migraine relief for your child through medical hypnosis,” is my headline.  They decided that the bed-wetter cure is too important to trust to an ignoramus like me; first I have to prove myself on lesser items. 

 

This afternoon I’m meeting the hardwood floor client, but I’m not expecting much. They don’t have any money to spend, and they believe that by saying “We have it all!”  they make you instantly understand what “all” encompasses. So who needs a writer?

 

Meanwhile, Nuke is bothered by something or another right now, but he’s mostly suffering from the “Cat Who Cried Wolf” syndrome: he’s been complaining bitterly all his life about my deficiencies in catering to his whims. Something is pestering him right now, but he’s frisky and alert and he’s eating and pooping normally. I can’t find any sore spots on his body, he still is leaping from point to point, still brings me his toys to demand I bring them to life for him to chase. 

 

That’s one reason I like cats: they understand fiction. They know damned well that isn’t a mouse stirring under the sheet of newspaper on the floor, but it’s fun to pretend. 

 

 

On Apr 19, 2014, at 10:18 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

You are probably the only person in the world who doesn’t think I have klutzy tendencies.  Case in point:  Remember when I stumbled in the Anaheim bathroom and shoved Parsy into a full bathtub?  I won’t enumerate any more–Rhonda the Adept it is.

 

Merry is still quite ill.  If she doesn’t start eating a little more, she may not make it through this.  I’ve been able to coax her to eat some strained chicken baby food, and she ate a couple of mouthfuls of her regular food this morning, but she’s very lethargic and still makes intermittent noises when she breathes or purrs.  Her regular vet X-rayed her chest and showed me that her lungs are mostly clear, and her heart is not enlarged, but he did prescribe another 7 days of Clavamox.  If she’s still not eating well on Monday, I’ll take her back for a sinus X-ray.  

I think all of our memories are selective and self-serving.  Not only do our memories not contain the 7 deadly sins, but a host of minor ones have probably been deleted as well.  This has advantages, in that it prevents us from dwelling on our mistakes.  The disadvantage, of course, is that we may repeat them if they have faded from memory.

 

I started a little journal of sorts in 2010–I say “of sorts” because it consists of letters to my beloved people who have died.  I can work out things I’d discuss with them if they were here, and express any angry feelings that were unresolved when they passed on.  Very therapeutic.

 

“Concrete nouns and active verbs” sounds like the basis for solid advertising to me.  It sounds like some of these companies are all James Joyce mixed with Faulkner, when what they need is Hemingway.  Clear cogent prose will sell anything worth selling.

 

 

 

On Apr 22, 2014, at 11:28 AM, Colin Campbell

<colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Nope, don’t remember that particular cat-in-the-tub incident.  This is one from the Web that I liked:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He looks just like Nuke. 

 

 

I grew up being called a klutz. But then I found out it was just my mother resenting me for being adroit. 

 

I don’t have beloved people who have died. I guess I’ve been lucky in that my friends haven’t died. Or maybe I just don’t have many friends.  

 

On my 35th birthday I wrote a 35-page letter to my father titled “Offspring Report” telling him what I was up to, and what my sibs were up to. And I ended the letter by saying if he didn’t write a letter back to me, I’d stop communicating. And he never wrote back to me, but he did send this subsequent Xmas card:

 

 

I heard from other people that he mentioned “Col’s letter” for years afterward, but he never said anything to me about it. 

 

I was certainly a klutz compared to him. After he had some heart surgery I asked him what he would like from us if he became incapacitated, and he was silent a while and then said, “Col, when you and I are in the same old folks’ home, I’ll still hit the ball farther than you.” 

 

I was surprised by my feelings when I discovered that Linda had died. Not grief, not joy, but dismay: it meant there would never be a resolution. I hadn’t been aware I was expecting a resolution. Apparently my hindbrain had been nursing the possibility that she would call me and apologize. 

 

But she alienated everybody in her life. It wasn’t just me. I found out she was dead by idly googling her name and finding it on a Social Security page of death certifications, three years after she died. I was astonished at the invisibility of her death. I’d always been resentful of her for accepting my help in furthering her career as she became Chairman of the Language Department at the high school where she taught, and founded the Language Lab in the school, and championed the Advanced Placement Art History course that resulted in many national recognitions, but in response she only belittled my career and urged me to instead become a waiter. 

 

So I ended the relationship. Later it turned out that she increasingly alienated her colleagues and students and eventually was asked to leave the school. There was no notice of her death in the Santa Barbara newspaper, which I thought was pretty strange for a well-known long-term local high school teacher. So I’ve decided that she might have suicided. She had a very expensive Colt Python .357.  But there is absolutely zero information about what actually happened. 

 

Hers is the only unexpected demise in my life, and it happened two decades after the last time I had any contact with her. I wrote probably a thousand pages of journal entries trying to resolve angry feelings about it back in the 80s, but it was not therapeutic. Just bafflement, magnified. 

           

She became a loony recluse, that’s all. And it makes me wonder about me, because it seems to be a trait among my gals. Janet is now a loony recluse outside of Taos, and Anna is now a loony recluse in outstate Oregon. And I’m a loony recluse in Campbell.

 

 

 

On Apr 24, 2014, at 9:30 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

The difference between the web cat-in-tub and my cat-in-tub was that Parsy had no chance to scramble–the tub was full and I knocked him off his feet right into it.  I’m not sure how he got out–my perception at the time was that he teleported.  Ten minutes later he was back in his usual spot on the wide tub rim, alternately licking his fur dry and glaring at me.  

 

I know what you mean about the memories you thought you had about the time we spent together.  Since I have been corresponding with you, it seems that we walked along the same path through life, but I remembered what was on the right side and you remembered what was on the left. 

 

The loony recluse label applies to me too, but if Richard had lived, we would have been called the loony reclusive couple.  He could be a very social person, hail fellow well met, never met a stranger.  But he was also quite happy to take off for a week in the woods with just me and the pets, and/or spend long hours reading.

 

I don’t want to pry, but I am very curious:  Why on earth would anyone expect you to be a waiter? If that’s too personal, feel free to tell me so.

 

Merry is somewhat better.  She is no longer struggling to breathe while she is at rest, but when she purrs or meows she still sounds like she’s gargling gravel.  She’s still on liquid medication, and she’s now fighting me when I give it to her–another sign of improving health!  

 

I had fed Jesse the same food ever since I adopted him in 2010–Nutro. About the first of this year, he became less than enthusiastic about it, so I started feeding him Blue Buffalo.  He loved it, and stopped periodically throwing up (something he’d done ever since I got him.)  Unfortunately, he also gained 7 oz.  When you only weigh 6 pounds to start with, that’s a lot!  The vet said Blue is high in fat, and though it’s made in the USA, they still use some ingredients purchased in China.  He recommended Royal Canin, so I bought a bag of that and am mixing it with the Blue for the next couple of weeks.  Hopefully he will thrive, but lose a few ounces, on the Royal Canin.  Most of the Chihuahuas and Pugs that I see look like barrels on toothpicks.  Not only is that unattractive, it’s unhealthy.

 

Speaking of health, I’m going to have to go back to the doctor who was treating my mosquito-bit ankle.  When my tooth abscessed, the toxins that invaded my body made ALL my joints hurt, but especially that right ankle.  Now, 3 months after the tooth blew up, my ankle is still very painful despite hot packs, pain pills and therapeutic insoles. Sigh….

 

 

On Apr 27, 2014, at 10:25 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Linda wanted me to become a waiter because it was only one letter different from “writer.” Har har. 

 

She did not like it that I was a writer. I did not have the academic qualifications to be a writer, and no amount of earning a living as a writer would suffice. She lived in the world of academe and nothing else existed. Her father was a chemistry professor at UC Santa Barbara–he died when Linda was in high school and there’s now an annual award in his name at the university. 

 

She was an art history teacher and she knew a lot of artists, but they were all artists with day jobs at schools. I knew lots of commercial artists–illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, etc–and she loathed them all because they worked for for filthy lucre rather than transcendent artistic goals funded by grants. 

 

I met her through a university connection. I wrote several magazine articles about UCSB research projects and the school hired me to write a recruitment brochure for the computer & electrical engineering department. Then a guy from the Social Simulation department asked me to participate in a demonstration they were putting on for a big oil company. The department created simulations of situations for training purposes; the one I was in was a simulated terrorist takeover of an offshore oil platform.  There were 20 of us participants and we were issued roles to play. 

 

I got caught up in the simulation and went into my hyperColin mode and used the information inputs they gave us and instigated events and eventually became the chief negotiator on the oil-company side. In the debriefing afterward, the other people on my team denounced me for not ceding to consensus. The consensus was to sit there and do nothing. 

 

Afterward the oil company execs came out and wanted to meet me and the director of the Social Simulation department was very pleased. A couple weeks later he invited me to a birthday party for one of the associate directors. I arrived late and discovered they’d been talking about me, and the director’s girlfriend started yakking with me.  And that was Linda. Within a week we were going at it hot and heavy. 

 

When she started meeting my friends she was shocked to discover what grubby compromises are necessary for artists and writers to survive in the commercial world. She was haughtily superior to those who actually made a living at art. 

 

And then she began talking to me less and less as the years went by. She remained ardent in the bedroom but did not want to socialize with my pals and when I finally demanded that she tell me what was going on, she said that she wasn’t talking because she was afraid I was writing down what she said.  

 

We argued drunk a lot and I couldn’t write down what she said because I couldn’t remember. I told her she had to start talking to me or it was over. She said I had to abandon my career as a writer. Instead I stopped seeing her.  

 

She’d been the chairman of the language department at the high school but her behavior became odd at school as she trended more and more toward inappropriate attire–flat out hooker outfits. Plus showing up to work drunk.  After seven or eight years of that she was asked to resign and became a loony recluse. 

 

Meanwhile, I have the klutz tiara this weekend–I ran into an orange that wouldn’t peel, and I impatiently cut it open with a serrated paring knife and efficiently sliced open the tip of my left thumb, sigh. Not quite of stitchable severity, wide but shallow. 

 

I got fired from the CMIC job. The president of the company decided to write his own goddam speech. However they’ll probably use my text as a handout brochure at the presentation at the investor’s conference in Florida in two weeks.

 

A headhunter called me with an opening for a marketing writer at Apple.  I have an interview with Apple on Tuesday.  

 

Something is pestering Nuke but I can’t figure out what’s wrong. I can’t find any hot spots on his body, he’s alert and frisky, no problems at the food bowl or the litter box, but he keeps standing on my desk between me and my monitors and complaining. 

 

Maybe he’s reacting to my personal work stress…except, he has traditionally reacted to that with big yawns. 

 

 

 

On Apr 30, 2014, at 12:21 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

At the risk of repeating myself, I think a thyroid function test for Nuke is in order, and perhaps a diabetes test.  Neither has symptoms that you would be able to discern, and both disorders are very common in older cats.  My Merry is still not well.  She sounds like she’s purring and meowing through gravel, though her lungs sound clear.  I’m to call the vet on Monday after she finishes this course of Clavamox.  I suppose it is a good sign that she is now fighting me instead of meekly swallowing her medicine.

 

You know, I think you told me once before about the writer/waiter deal–I just thought you were being facetious.  I guess I’m not the only one who made some poor choices.  My ex Bob changed completely after we got married.  All of a sudden my cooking was no good (!), I didn’t know how to keep house, couldn’t do the laundry correctly and on and on and on.  I never poured a glass of milk without hearing “Adults don’t need milk.  Only babies need milk.” I finally got sick of that one evening after a very taxing day at work.  I poured my milk, turned to him and repeated his little mantra before he could say it and then said (in a tone of wonder and delight) “I must be a baby!”

 

Two weeks later I came home to a note telling me he couldn’t take “it” anymore and wouldn’t be back.  He cleaned out all the bank accounts, but he was smart enough to leave the dogs.  I would have hunted him down if he had taken even one of the 3 dogs.  I was very upset for about a month, partly because I was afraid to stay by myself.  Then I came to my senses, changed the locks, bought 100 rounds of ammunition for my Browning .380 and set about learning to embrace solitude.  I learned later that he had thought I would be begging him to come back (One of his cousins stayed in touch with me.)

This all occurred in the last half of 1989.

 

After I made sure our tax return for 1989 was correct, signed and filed, I filed for a divorce.  When that was final, I wrote him a cold and dispassionate letter telling him that yes, I needed and got treatment for bi-polar disorder.  But I told him that he suffered from several deep and ineradicable psychoses for which he was too stubborn to seek treatment.  His cousin called me a week later & asked me what I had written in the letter to him, so I told her “the truth.”  I made sure he wasn’t making noises about driving over here to discuss it and then she and I had a good laugh about it.  She said no one had ever confronted him like that before.  

 

Bob did two nice things for me while we were married:  He took me to every chemotherapy treatment (in 1984, a patient was admitted one evening and released the next morning) and picked me up on time, and he left me. 

 

I haven’t thought of all that crap in awhile.  Why is that people like Linda and Bob don’t find each other?  He was forever denigrating my degree AND my Mensa membership.  Every time he got drunk, he started bragging about how he could get into Mensa any time he wanted, and of course my reply was always “I’m sure you could.  Take the test.”  That infuriated him every time.  Then he’d start on my having been in a mental hospital (for a week, and I voluntarily signed myself in.)  I’m glad this is all in the past.

 

I just got started on one of the Anne McCaffrey series I’ve never read.  I bought “The Tower and the Hive” not realizing it was number 5 in a series.  So I put it aside and bought the Rowan and read that (loved it!) and Amazon should be delivering #2 and #3, Damia and Damia’s Children, tomorrow.  I also bought and put aside #4, Lyon’s Pride.  It’s supposed to rain Sunday, so I plan to dive into the rest of the series then.

scover what grubby compromises are necessary for artists and writers to survive in the commercial 

 

 

On May 2, 2014, at 9:55 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Happy approximately your birthday.

 

I loved the original Dragonrider novel but I lost interest in the endless sequels. Or, I lost interest in sci-fi, and fiction in general. The last hardcover sci-fi I bought was Heinlein’s THE CAT WHO WALKS THROUGH WALLS, mainly because the main character in the novel is named Colin Campbell. I still occasionally re-read an older Heinlein novel, a comfort read, but the books from his senile phase are useless bullshit. Paragraph by paragraph, his stuff reads just like it did in the old days, but nothing adds up. The sharply written opening segment sets up a great number of intriguing questions, and not one of them is ever answered, or even addressed, in the ensuing half a thousand pages. An incoherent dream that never ends and never gets anywhere. 

 

I’ve spent my life doing nothing but reading. I didn’t make a decision to stop reading fiction, I just was more interested in non-fiction. The last sci-fi that really revved me up was probably A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY by Vernor Vinge. 

 

This week I’m reading GOING CLEAR, about L. Ron Hubbard and the Scientologists, except it’s the most depressing thing I’ve read in a long time and I suddenly realized that I don’t have to finish it and I set it aside after 215 pages. 

 

My interview at Apple turned out to be a phone interview and I didn’t do well. So it goes. I didn’t think I had much chance, anyway, as among the specs for the job were MBA and “Keynote guru.”  Keynote is the Apple version of Powerpoint and I’ve never touched Keynote. But, they could tell that from my resume and still wanted to talk to me. Then they asked me what project management software I was familiar with, and I’m absolutely blind in that area, I don’t have any idea what the name of any project management application is. 

 

I try to keep learning new software. But they’re making new stuff faster than I can keep up.  

 

One of the hypocrisies of Linda was that she bitched and moaned about being limited to teaching high school kids who were morons. Well, get a job at the City College, I suggested. Nope, they required a master’s degree. Well, get a master’s degree, I said. This touched off a lecture about how she would never demean herself to do such a thing, she was a teacher, not a student.  She was content to never learn anything new ever again. 

 

 

 

On May 8, 2014, at 8:27 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Thanks for the b-day greetings.  It was not a memorable day, as birthdays go.  I woke up on Friday the 2nd in the firm grasp of a lupus flare (chills/fever, joint pains, extreme fatigue,) and that lasted through Monday.  Tuesday I had the third of four dental appointments for root planing .  Meanwhile, through all of this, Merry is not improving.

 

I generally try to make sure that any extreme moods I have don’t slop over onto other people, so that’s why I’m going to make this brief.  One thing I did accomplish during the “lupus” weekend:  I finished the entire “Tower and Hive” series by Anne McCaffrey.  Total escape.  More later.

 

 

On May 10, 2014, at 11:33 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Friday:

I feel somewhat less like an angry pit bull today and more like a golden retriever, so I thought I could risk communicating with the world…Took Merry to her regular vet today, and he thinks she has either a nasal polyp or a nasal tumor.  I’m to continue the antibiotic and call the local specialist in internal medicine on Monday (she isn’t in today.)  Merry expressed her opinion of the entire visit, exam and antibiotic booster shot by peeing in her crate.  Passive-aggressive little kitty: “But mom, I couldn’t help it–I’m sick!”

 

I think it’s interesting that you swore off fiction–I tried to remember the last non-fiction book I read and came up with one that could have been called The Jewish Faith for Dummies.  I can’t remember the author or the title (I read it 10-12 years ago) but I found it very interesting.  A couple of Jewish friends were approving, but one was just amazed.  “Why are you reading that book?”  “Well, because I know very little about Jewish traditions and would like to know more.”  “Never ran into a Gentile who had any interest in Jewish lore.” And so on and so forth.  He was almost hostile.  

 

Saturday:

I do read my Popular Science magazine from cover to cover each month–I suppose most of those articles qualify as non-fiction.  I like the escape afforded by fiction.  The only times I usually dive into non-fiction is when I need to know more about a subject, i.e., gluten.  My mother taught me what it was as she taught me to bake, but I had to research to find out why it was damaging to some people.  I have a couple of books written by doctors and nutritionists, and a cookbook written by one of the same doctors.  

 

I have to go to the grocery store for some more chicken baby food–Merry only likes moist cat food if it’s mixed with baby food.  Gee, I wonder whose fault that is???

 

On May 11, 2014, at 6:48 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

It must be terrible to have those lupus flare-ups. My paresthesia doesn’t flare up…the only similar thing I endure is the occasional migraine in the eye. All I can do is close the shutters and huddle in bed until it goes away. Oh, and shingles, but it’s been years since I had a bad flare-up.

 

I don’t have mood swings, I’m mostly just a labrador  (Oh boy! A BALL!!!). A girl I dated told me I was the calmest person she’d ever met. Mostly, though, people can’t tell anything at all about me. A flat affect. 

 

I didn’t swear off fiction, it just faded away. Instead of sci-fi adventures on other planets, I read about the latest astronomical facts. I’ve been on a binge reading archaeology and paleontology. I’m fascinated by human origins and the history of technology. This week’s book is NEANDERTHALS REDISCOVERED: How Modern Science Is Rewriting Their Story, by Mimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse

 

Reading is my main mania. If only I could figure out a way to get paid to read Web pages, I’d be rich. I’ve been reading ever since the start of my consciousness. When I was six I read a magazine article about the US purchase of Alaska and I was tickled by the word “folly,” as in “Seward’s Folly,” and when the family got a new kitten I insisted on naming it Folly, who carried the name for 21 years.  How did Razzles get her name?

 

I have a few cousins who are up to their ears in genealogy and they don’t comprehend my indifference when they tell me that they’ve discovered the name of some ancestor or show me rubbings off gravestones. Instead I’m interested in the antecedents of the human race as a whole: where did we come from? 

 

I don’t know a thing about Jewish faith. My softball team in Santa Barbara, The Woodpeckers, was mostly Jewish graduate students from UCSB, for a while. I was able to use a lot of jokes like, have you seen the new porn/horror crossover movie for Jewish-American princesses? DEBBIE DOES DISHES. 

 

But they were skewed from the norm for Jews, because they were hard-drinking ballplayers besides being arcane intellectuals. They were equally religious as me, ie, nil. My pal from the Israeli Olympic swimming team is a non-observant Jew…except he has occasional surges of dietary restriction grief. Lobster is not kosher, but he eats it anyhow and then regrets it for a drink or two.

 

My mother might have taught me to bake. I baked a lot when I was a kid and I think I moved ahead of her in using the cookbook to learn to bake new things.  

 

I never participated in Mother’s Day events. “What if your Mom isn’t worth feting?” is not an acceptable excuse in today’s marketing-led society. A few years ago there was a story about a prisoner who was down and out because he couldn’t see his son on Father’s Day, every Father’s Day he felt so forlorn because his son scorned to contact him. Awww, the poor guy. And then you found out he was in prison because during a custody dispute he slipped into the house and doused the six-year-old with lighter fluid and set him on fire. As if that’s an excuse for the kid to not send a Hallmark card. 

 

Not that my mother was that bad. I don’t recall if you met her. She spent her life heaping calumny on all the spouses of her offspring. I recall you answering the phone and then picking the headset up by the cord as if you were holding a dead rat by the tail and saying, “It’s your mother.”  

 

Today I spent a few hours creating a Web page of photos of my mother’s opulent 30-acre estate in Oklahoma, pictures of the only time I ever visited her in my adult life. She died a couple weeks after my visit and I didn’t go the funeral. If you and I had played our cards right, all this could have been ours. 

 

http://colin.org/Photos/2002Photos/CrossContinent/Oklahoma/MaryAntonian/shed.html

 

 

 




On May 16, 2014, at 1:51 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Lupus flare-ups are no fun, but considering the potential fatality of the disease, I shouldn’t complain.  At least I have not–so far–experienced the malar rash, which spreads across the cheeks and nose.  My cheeks and nose(and ears!) get fiery red during a flare, but no rash.

 

Funny, I can’t remember you having a “flat affect.”  Perhaps that occurred with your switch to non-fiction??  Of course, my Popular Science magazines have EXCITING non-fiction (such as the current issue which has a long article about how scientists are trying to transfer brains to computers.  Fascinating.)  I don’t recall where I was going with that….

 

Razzles got her name because she always seemed frazzled.  The oddest name I ever gave a pet was Pasha.  I had walked around the animal shelter, and all the dogs were too big, too loud, too snappy or something, and a shelter worker walked in with Pasha on a leash.  Every dog in the shelter was expressing itself at the top of its lungs. She had just been picked up as a stray, and in all that horrendous noise, she looked around and calmly sat down.  I went over and snapped my fingers behind her head to make sure she wasn’t deaf, and I swear she leaned against my knee & said “my name is Pasha.”  She was a black dachshund mix with a white chest, weighed about 18 pounds and was about six years old.  They had to hold her for 3 days to allow any owner to claim her, and I must have called them 15 times until they finally told me I could pick her up.  She was a very affectionate dog.

 

You and I still share that reading thing, even if we do read different things.  I’m not very interested in the antecedents of the human race–I’m interested in what makes them tick.  But, like you, if I could get paid for reading, I’d be rich.

 

If I ever met your mother, I don’t remember her.  I’ve had 4 mothers-in-law and none of them liked me.  Richard’s mother was the worst–she was so nasty to me the first time we visited her that he turned to me as we were walking to the car and said “As far as I’m concerned you don’t ever have to come here again.”  You know what?  I took him up on that.

 

I’ve got to stop and take an imitrex–this migraine has been coming on for a couple of hours and has not responded to coffee & Excedrin.  Yeah, it’s too bad we didn’t play our cards right–I never was much of a card player…..

 

 

On May 20, 2014, at 7:02 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

My “flat affect” was probably a side effect of slamming the door shut on my previous life in 1975. Everything I did was too harsh and abrasive, so I stopped doing anything and let my published output do the talking. 

 

My pal Janet Planet called me “Captain Zero” because of it.  She wrote an article for Santa Barbara Magazine and it wasn’t good enough and I made her re-do it and go back and get more information and to insert more of herself and her point of view into the article, which was about an outfit that took in homeless youth and put them to work on a farm in a semi-Amish way of life. It was a controversial topic in Santa Barbara. Eventually the article was published–and became the talk of the town, the first article in the magazine’s history that anybody noticed. I was so jealous…she and I were quite close for a while (but never intimate) and I was deflated by her nickname. I didn’t realize I was radiating zeroness.

 

I didn’t have trouble with Linda’s mother. She was polite to me but she was in a constant battle with Linda about matters I wasn’t privy to. It was a generational thing, I guess…one time I had dinner with Linda and her mom and her grandmother. They’d prepared me with tales of how senile Granny is so be careful. She was a frail-looking old woman who said nothing during the meal while the rest of us yakked and the topic came around to politics–it was a Presidential election year–and I did some mental math and saw that Granny would have been of age to vote in 1920 and I asked her if she had voted the first time women were allowed to vote,  and she became animated and loquacious about her years as a Suffragette and then campaigning for Cox and then that bastard Harding got in. 

 

I thought I would get brownie points for bringing the old lady into the conversation, but Linda was furious with me because Granny was officially over the hill and now it was time for Loretta to be the queen bee, the focus of all attention. It was a strange family because other than Linda’s sister and her husband in San Mateo, this was the entirety of their family. No cousins anywhere. No aunts or uncles. Nobody else. I thought of them as a tetrahedron,  one woman at each vertex of the simplest Platonic solid, a crystal shard with no connection to the rest of the world.

 

Transferring brains to computers is still a long way off. We still have no idea what glial cells are for, so we can’t build a computer model of them.  New microscopy techniques are revealing unexpected complexities of brain structures and the theories are lagging behind, as far as connecting anything to the human thought process.  Ray Kurzweil is the guy I look at for discussion of the  brain/computer merger–he thinks that computers will be able to emulate the brain even if we don’t understand how it works, by using the brute-force method that worked for IBM’s Watson computer to emulate a human contesting on JEOPARDY. 

 

Kurzweil thinks we’ll be able to buy a human-ability computer in 2030 for a thousand bucks, citing Moore’s Law. I doubt we’ll have any kind of mental information transfer technology by then. 

 

Why did Bob have a bug up his ass about Mensa? I was always proud to have had a wife who was even smarter than I am. I’m too lazy to go through the process of getting my scores from my school tests. I went to a Mensa mixer night in Santa Barbara but it was at a bar and I was too timid to approach anybody. Then I got involved in the early phase of the Internet, the local BBS system, and met all kinds of hyperintelligent youths.  A major event in my life. 

 

 

On May 23, 2014, at 7:47 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I thought I could sit down and talk rationally to you, but I can’t.  I had to put Merry down on Thursday. A cat scan determined that she had metastasized nasal cancer, and the Dr. said she was probably in pain.  I know I did the right thing, but I am still an emotional wreck.  Have to postpone the rational reply to your e-mail for a day or two–sorry.

 

 

On May 24, 2014, at 10:54 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Sorry to hear about Merry.  There’s no easy way around it…I kept my last cat alive for a year after she should have gone, and it was the wrong thing to do. I merely prolonged her suffering. 

 

 

On May 25, 2014, at 10:57 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Well, I seem to have a bit more control today.   You and Jim & Jennifer are the only people I have told, because I can’t trust my composure on the phone.  On Friday, after I had washed Merry’s bowls and put the cleaned litter box away and cleaned off “her” counter in the utility room, I took Jesse outside.  One of the most complete rainbows I’ve ever seen was displayed across the southern sky.  As far as I’m concerned, that was Merry telling me she was OK.  No one else has to agree with me.  I have learned to listen when the universe speaks.

 

Was her name actually Janet Planet?  Reminds me of a TV show I saw where one of the characters was named Buttons Dutton.  Perhaps you weren’t radiating zeroness; perhaps you were radiating frequencies that she couldn’t receive?

 

I realize transferring brains to computers is not just around the corner, but I thought it was fascinating to read about the different approaches people are taking.  With your predilection for non-fiction, I understand that you wouldn’t be interested in the meandering journey, just the arrival at the goal.  

 

Bob didn’t really care about Mensa–what he took issue with was MY membership.  He changed so abruptly when we got married that I finally realized he had a madonna/whore complex.  He was also a control freak (as witness his asinine behavior over milk.)  If he didn’t initiate it or think of it first, then it was of no value in his eyes.  He wasn’t the Alpha wolf he wanted to be–he was just a shrinking, whining Omega.  Too bad I didn’t see that before I said “I do”.  He was quite the actor.

 

I dreamed of a kitten last night–a PINK tabby.  Perhaps that was my mind cautioning my heart that a new kitten isn’t a good idea right now.  I was in Paris in the dream–quite a fanciful journey I took.  Maybe they HAVE pink tabbies in Paris???

 

 

 

On May 27, 2014, at 9:09 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Her name was Janet Gates but she styled herself “Janet Planet, Keeper of the Cosmos.” She’s a couple years older than us and grew up a child of privilege in Avalon, the only city on Santa Catalina Island, 26 miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me. 

 

She took up the pseudonym as a defense measure, I suppose, because she’d abandoned her two daughters to somebody else’s care in order to be an artiste.  She wrote one more article for me at the magazine and then decided writing was too haaard and switched to photography, where you just stand there and press the button and the stupid machine does all the work. 

 

So she latched onto the magazine’s director of photography and busted up his marriage and learned to shoot a big Nikon and process prints in the darkroom. Then she moved on to a new guy and something else. I remained friends with her longer than the rest of the guys because I never slept with her. Today she’s a member of the Loony Recluse Club outside of Taos. 

 

I recently got a call from a guy seeking info about her, the Hollywood guy for whom I starred in THE BIG TOMATO.   http://colin.org/Photos/1980s/1983photos/Tomato/TheBigTomato.html

He’s sinking fast due to cancer and is finishing his autobiography and wanted to include her along with Andy Warhol’s “superstar” Edie Sedgwick as important girlfriends in his life. 

 

 

I don’t dream about cats, but a couple days after my last cat died she appeared in a dream and told me not to worry, she was in a real nice place now. I accepted it as the universe speaking to me. 

 

Actually, I”m following the meandering journey toward brain transfer pretty closely. The problem is that there are so many possible promising tendrils of exploration and so few of them pan out. People can now operate advanced prosthetics just the way they’d use a real hand–mentally clench your fist, and the artificial hand makes a fist. But, accessing artificially stored memories? Not a glimmer on the research horizon. 

 

Linda changed gradually rather than abruptly, but then we didn’t have a marriage as a marking point. I don’t recall discussing Mensa with her; my intellect was demarcated by my lack of a college degree, QED.  She therefore discounted anything I said. 

 

Her last name when I met her was Siemens, a remnant of her marriage to a rich heir who ran through his fortune in a hurry. She was plagued by high school students phoning her at 3 in the morning and saying things about her last name. I suggested we could put a tap on the line and discover who was doing it. No, no. Well, then why don’t you revert to your maiden name? No, no, her colleagues assured her it was a long arduous process involving expensive legal fees. 

 

Nope, I said, you can go to the county courthouse and file a form for $12.  No, no. I pestered her into going to the courthouse and of course I was proven wrong: it cost $15. So she was able to resume using her dear dead daddy’s name, McRary, but I didn’t get any brownie points for being right. And the students immediately tagged her with a new nickname, McScary. 

 

Eventually I realized that she was a masochist and she was punishing herself by hanging out with a low-life like Colin. Her favorite book was THE STORY OF O.  I was such a sadist that I refused to beat her.  In retrospect I decided she was doing a LADY CHATTERLY’S LOVER thing, an affair with the gardener, and it was not amusing to her that I conversed so easily with her colleagues about their own specialties. 

 

She increasingly closed herself off to me, but after I severed the relationship I found out that it wasn’t just me, she’d closed herself off from everybody in all aspects of her life.   

           

The odd thing that I learned about her was that she had no referents for the word “play.”  She’d never played cards or board games. She’d never played any sport, wouldn’t know which end of a baseball bat to pick up.  She played no music. “Play” had a negative connotation–she’d visit at my office at the magazine and then later accuse us of merely playing, which couldn’t possibly have anything to do with creativity. 

 

As an art historian, Linda knew that all the important creative work has already been done and is on display in museums. My work was not in museums. Ergo, I should become a waiter. 

 

And then a highly successful brochure that I created was accepted into the permanent collection of the American Institute for the Graphic Arts, so what do you know, I am in a museum. She was not amused by this. 

 

 

On May 31, 2014, at 10:57 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I clicked on the Big Tomato link, but nothing happened??  I continue to dream about cats, both fanciful and realistic.  I guess my dreams will eventually point me in the direction of a new feline family member.  

 

Yesterday I cleaned off the “ugly pile” on my desk.  There is one piece of notepaper I have to leave displayed–it says **NORTON, NOT MCAFEE**  I have an inordinate amount of difficulty remembering which security company I use, and have come very close to paying for both…..Sigh.   Hence the sign.

 

My mind is like a mountain goat today, jumping from peak to peak–probably a manic episode is in the near future.  Do you like yogurt?  I like regular Yoplait, strawberry or orange crème.  When companies started advertising Greek yogurt, I tried it because it has 12 grams of protein, and I always struggle to get enough protein in my diet.  But you know what?  Greek yogurt is the emperor’s new clothes!  I have tried every brand available in this area and find them all sour and chalky. Ick.

 

I’m still hemming and hawing about moving to Kentucky.  I now understand my mother a lot better–she came out here in 1993 for an open-ended stay and wound up going home after a month.  I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t want to stay here with me.  She told me I had made her welcome and her decision to leave had everything to do with the fact that she just wanted to go home.  I didn’t understand that then, but I do now.

 

How’s Nuke doing?  Jesse has looked for Merry a couple of times.  When I would go grocery shopping or running errands, they would both be on the bed when I got home.  A foot or two apart, but both curled up and relaxed.  I have no qualms about Jesse getting along with another cat.  When he was dropped off anonymously at the shelter, he was in a crate WITH a cat.  If I’d known, I probably would have taken both of them (and run the risk of having Merry poison my coffee…..) She and Jesse growled and hissed at each other for a few months, but eventually arrived at an armed truce.

 

 

 

 

On Jun 3, 2014, at 12:49 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

As a Macintosh guy, I never have to worry about computer security. So I don’t have to pay either Norton or McAfee. On the other hand, as a Web domain owner, I have to keep track of a different batch of factors and make sure I don’t absent-mindedly let them lapse. The yearly domain fee, the Internet service provider, and the hosting service all have different due dates. I keep changing the hosting service because they give you a teaser introductory rate and then want you to pay “regular” rates that are three or four times higher. Last year I took Danica Patrick’s advice and switched to Go-Daddy and so far they haven’t tried to gouge me. 

 

I was into the Web game very early–I think my site was the 28,000th to go into operation, and today there are three billion sites, almost all of which are devoted to cat videos.  Here’s a cat video from my site: 

http://www.colin.org/nukebrush/

 

As to yogurt, I don’t believe I have ever had a single bite of yogurt. Maybe a foggy memory of a cone of frozen yogurt I spat out in the 1950s. There was some dunderheaded comic-book sidekick named Yogurt and perhaps I developed a negative response to the word back then. 

 

Mostly I’m an omnivore, I don’t pay any attention to my diet. Food is just fuel for me. Or maybe I’m in search of the perfect Paleo diet–nothing but roast mastodon, etc. 

 

Maybe you should try your mother’s methodology–go and stay with Jim for a month and see how things go. When was the last time you visited? 

 

I get along fine with my sister Mary–on the phone. In person, she is such a collection of tics and misperceptions that after a few days I can barely wait to escape from her presence. And my arcane monomanias no doubt induce a reciprocal feeling in her.  

 

 

Today I’m chasing my tail about the Web site project for a local hardwood flooring company.  I designed a new home page for them and the owner liked it a lot. The Web development company I’m working for liked it a lot.  But, they can’t afford to do it so as a stopgap measure they want me to do something else. 

 

Well, okay, my plan has been set aside. What is the new plan, sketch out for me what’s going to be on the page so I can create the appropriate text.  Their reply is *SPLUTTER*.  They lecture me on the importance of “content” in the modern Web era. So they just want generic content, how hard could that be? 

 

“Content” is such a buzzword now in the Web biz. The Web development company asked me to look at the content on another client’s site and analyze why a particular page wasn’t getting looked at by visitors. 

 

I looked at it and the key item on the page was a 7-minute video purportedly explaining the product’s features and benefits. At the two-minute mark the sound conked out and after that all you saw was people talking to each other about something and you heard nothing but a random clicking. 

 

The video had been on the page for six years and nobody at the client or at the Web agency had ever bothered to actually look at the thing all the way through. It was “content,” something that customers were required to endure, something that the bosses thankfully never had to look at themselves. 

 

I tell them that the content should be useful information about hardwood flooring and they look at me like I’m a crazy man.  They want the content to say “We’re proud to be the leader,” like their existing site which is so  magnetic that it attracts 6 whole visitors a day. 

 

My big failure as a copywriter has been my inability to deliver the flattery that clients are willing to pay for. Instead I’ve focused on the stupid fucking facts. Companies don’t like to reveal facts about themselves. They prefer to present a gauzy fantasy of what they would be like if they were better, a pleasant fiction about the company rather than the rancid real facts. 

 

 

 

 

On Jun 7, 2014, at 7:33 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I don’t think I have ever known anyone who has a Macintosh, so please keep that in mind when I ask what you mean about never having to worry about computer security??  The Windows 8 format on this Gateway computer threw me for a loop when I first encountered it.  I have learned what I know about computers piecemeal. When I run across something I need to know–and don’t–I ask someone or research it online.  I take it that PCs don’t have domain fees and hosting services…..oh, I guess they would if they had web sites?  Maybe you could start by telling me what a Mac operating system is called.  Didn’t know you’d be asked to do some tutoring, did you?

 

We differ widely in our approach to food. Sometimes, particularly if I’m not feeling good, it’s just fuel to me, too.  But usually I plan my meals with variety and taste in mind.  I measure portions, control the amount of salt and fat, and stay gluten-free.  It helps that I never developed a fast-food habit.  When I was still working, I had the occasional Philly cheese-steak from Bruchi’s, a chain that made a very similar sandwich to the ones I had in Allentown, PA. Now that I live approximately 25 miles from the nearest Bruchi’s, I haven’t had one in several years.

 

I can sympathize with your frustration with the hardwood flooring company.  Sounds like they don’t see their customers as people, so why bother giving them information upon which to make a decision?  If your target audience is a “database” then they only need generic content.  But if you are trying to sell your product to real flesh and blood people, then you hire someone like Colin and turn him loose!  That is, if you’re smart.

 

I’m glad you mentioned trying my mother’s approach and going to stay with Jim & Jennifer for a month.  That had the effect of a bucket of ice water in my face.  My immediate reaction was “I can’t stay away from home for that long!” I’ve never been to visit them.  They came to see me in 2004, but insisted on staying in a motel.  Jim came to see me by himself in 1989, and when Richard died in 2001.  I have not given this potential move all the attention it deserves.  

 

This e-mail seems very disjointed, but it mirrors my mind today……….

 

 

On Jun 8, 2014, at 11:51 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

The Macintosh operating system is known as OS. How they ever came up with that is a mystery.  After OS 9 they started naming it OS X with a cat name; I stuck with OS 9 until OS X 10. 3, “Panther,” because Cheetah, Puma, and Jaguar were not suitable for professional use. 

 

Then they went through Tiger and Leopard, and Snow Leopard, and Lion and Mountain Lion, and then at the unveiling of OS X 10.9, the Apple executive announced that they couldn’t allow further development to be limited by a shortage of cat names, so now the operating systems are named after California landmarks; the newest one is called OS X 10.10 Yosemite. 

 

Macintosh has always been immune to the viruses and worms that infest Windows.  There was one pesky Macintosh virus back in 1992 but it caused little damage and was quickly stomped out. One reason for the immunity is that the Mac is a closed system designed to operate only Macintosh computers and accessories, while Windows is an open architecture accessible to all. Windows works as a stand-alone, but when it’s connected to the Web there are zillions of access points for bad boys to seize control of. 

 

Also, Mac and Windows had basically different attitudes from the beginning. Windows tried to make sure every PC  everywhere could run Windows. They didn’t want to alienate existing customers with a new system that wouldn’t work on their old computer. Apple every so often essentially says, Thank you for buying all that expensive equipment, but throw it away–in order to run the latest OS, you’ll have to buy a new computer and all new software.

 

So Windows has ancient security holes that modern versions attempt to patch over, but you need Norton or McAfee to keep all the intruders out. There is no equivalent security software on the Macintosh side.  We luxuriate in ignorance of the virus wars. 

 

It’s all going to be moot because computers are now dinosaurs of the past. Smartphones and tablets are taking over. The main new features of OS X 10.10 Yosemite are designed to be more compatible with smartphones and tablets and social media. I’ve been unable to merge with the social media trend…I have accounts at Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and Pintarest and Flickr and Yelp and YouTube and several others, but I do not participate much. 

 

These companies are mostly going to flop because the revenue trail is so ephemeral. Twitter was a glamorous stock for a while but the fad is fading and their net worth has fallen from $36 billion to $18 billion since Christmas.  Facebook keeps changing itself without letting users know what’s going on, a continuous morphing of purpose into something new, something designed to peddle demographic information about you to advertisers. My paranoia is that Facebook will merge with the NSA to become an arm of the government, you won’t be able to cash your check without supplying your Facebook ID. 

 

All of the social media companies are running into the Yogi Berra problem: “Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded.” 

 

What part of Kentucky do Jim and Jennifer live in? Have you ever been to Kentucky? Nobody ever visits me in the Bay Area, I have to go to my sibs’ towns if I’m to see them. Matt occasionally was in town repairing robots in Silicon Valley, but that was three times in twenty years. 

 

I guess I’ve travelled to see my sibs far more than they have. I mean, it’s not that they’re snubbing me, they don’t visit each other, either. We had occasional Xmas get-togethers in whatever town my father was in at the time–Detroit, Florida, Las Vegas, Santa Barbara. But I’m the only one who regularly visited others outside of the holiday window. And since the Great Recession killed my revenues I haven’t been able to go anywhere. 

 

 

 

On Jun 12, 2014, at 6:40 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

So Windows is the Volkswagen and Macintosh is the Porsche? I must say it would be wonderful not to worry about viruses. I am not in the market right now for a computer, but what you have told me makes me want to at least compare prices and features when I do look for a new one.  I suspect Macs are more expensive than pcs–my Gateway only cost $289.  It has everything I need EXCEPT a word-processing program.

 

Speaking of cost, I had a pleasant surprise today.  My washer had started making a horrendous noise and not spinning all the water out of the clothes.  It’s less than 3 years old, so I called the store where I bought it and set up a service call for today.  They told me it would be $89.95 PLUS any parts and labor.  The serviceman called at 9:00 and said he’d be out between 11 and 12.  He arrived at 11:15, worked on the machine for almost an hour and then told me there would be no charge beyond the basic service call.  WOW!  I’m impressed.  And the washer works again.  And of course I will go to that store the next time I need an appliance.

 

Jim & Jennifer live in Lawrenceberg, a town of about 10,000.  It’s approximately 25 miles west of Lexington, where Jim works.  I’ve been through Kentucky numerous times, going from Michigan to Virginia, and when I visited my Mom once I flew into and out of the Louisville airport.  

 

You’re ahead of me as far as social networking goes–I haven’t joined any of them.  I kind of meant to get on Facebook, but when I got to their “joining” screen, I couldn’t come up with any good answers as to why I would give them all that information.  Paranoid, huh.  Oh well, it’s always better for a bipolar person to be a paranoid than a singlenoid.  Covers all the bases…

 

 

 

On Jun 15, 2014, at 10:42 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

It’s not really a Volkswagen/Porsche dichotomy…the machines with the greatest power are all PCs; their evolution has been driven by the gamers, who disdain Macs as low-end junk.

 

The physical parts are pretty much interchangeable now between Mac or PC; the monitors and keyboards and printers are agnostic about operating systems.  There’s a sullen consensus that the very best personal computer available in the world is a MacBook Pro running Windows 7. 

 

Were you an early adopter of computers, or were they just the tool you had to use at work? 

 

I’ve been so enmeshed in computers…after I wrote a recruitment brochure for the UCSB computer & engineering department in 1982, I swapped the resulting check for an Osborne computer and a daisywheel printer. It took me about a year to learn the machinery and software well enough to set aside my IBM Correcting Selectric.  There weren’t any games available for the Osborne, it was strictly a business computer. It came with a word processor (WORDSTAR), a spreadsheet, and a database. I never did learn to use the database stuff. 

 

When I switched to Macintosh in 1987, I budgeted six months for the switch-over time, but the Mac and I turned out to be so sympatico that my entire business was switched over to the Mac within three days, cripes. I never touched the Osborne again. 

 

Anyhow, I’ve been wallowing in computers all these years and yet it seems like I’m just getting started.  I’m timorous about the whole social media swirl, but I must dive in if I’m to find new customers. I’m perpetually skating on the edge of oblivion…the ice floes keep melting out from under me. 

 

Facebook wants more and more information and it’s all so they can more easily sell you to their advertisers. In my work I have to research all kinds of items in order to write the copy, and Facebook thinks that I’m the one interested in hand scraped carbonized bamboo flooring. So Facebook keeps suggesting flooring supplies to me, or at least they did until I installed an ad blocker. 

 

It’s not my paranoia keeping me away from the social media, I’m not very paranoid, except for delusions of grandeur. I’m still kind of a megalomaniac.  I hadn’t thought about the Mensa stuff for a long time until you brought it up…maybe if I’d never taken any IQ tests, people would have left me alone when I was a kid, but I was a spike in their graphs.  

 

 My family treated me like a basilisk. Facebook has been bombarding me about my 50th high school graduation anniversary and it reminds me that later in the summer after graduation my stepfather got unusually drunk and gave me a lecture explaining that I’d graduated solely for the purpose of belittling him, because he’d dropped out in the ninth grade. For the finale he burned my  diploma and my varsity letter from the baseball team. You can be smart, kid, but not in this house. 

 

Oh well you know about being different from the rest of the crowd. I’ve tried to make a living at it.

 

I don’t know what IQ is. Sometimes I think it’s merely neural speed–some brains are wired better.  I always had extraordinarily fast reflexes, but that’s not in the IQ tests. I didn’t feel “smart” as a kid, I explained to myself that the only reason I did well was that I’d been reading my brains out since I was 4 and I had a very large vocabulary, so I was able to analyze and understand the questions fast. 

 

My pal Jerry Dunn was the editor at Santa Barbara Magazine for a while and then left for Washington to take a staff spot on National Geographic’s travel magazine. He moved back to Santa Barbara a few years later and one of the things he told me was that he’d met three or four people who could read as fast as me. 

 

I’ve learned all my computer junk by reading. I haven’t had a single bit of formal training. It was a heady time for me in the 90s when I was moving from project to project in San Francisco doing graphics for courtroom presentations one week and creating packaging for new Power Ranger toys the next week. There were lots of other Mac jockeys and we swapped info back and forth on the job and sometimes you were the one seeking info and other times you were the one who knew a special trick. Great camaraderie. I sure miss it. 

 

This weekend I’ve completed a nine-page draft of the new Web site for a local flooring company. I’ve put in a ton more work than I’ll get paid for because it’s a chance to do a site as the top-down boss of the content. I desperately need that on my resume here in Silicon Valley…

 

 

 

 

On Jun 20, 2014, at 8:34 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

The only thing that really snagged my attention in what you’ve said about Macs is that there are basically no viruses.

 

My first experience with “computers” involved simple machines that had an Employment Security database, a Public Assistance database, and a database of our Support Enforcement cases.  That was in 1983, when I started working for the State of Washington.  All case notes were in longhand on “hard cards” and all the payments were posted–by hand–on the front of those 8-1/2×11 cards.  Being a public agency, we lagged far behind the private sector.  We still used rotary dial phones until 1986!  

 

PCs crept in step by step until ultimately all the payments were posted electronically, and FINALLY the case notes were entered directly on the computer.  Notes were the last thing to be converted.

 

Somewhere in the early 90s, someone gave me an 8088 computer and I bought a dot matrix printer.  I had no internet access, but I really liked that old warhorse.  Then in 1995, I bought a new 486, got internet access and have simply upgraded equipment as necessary.  Never considered a Mac.  I have racked my brains, but I cannot remember ever seeing a Mac at Office Depot or Costco.  Of course, the fact that I wasn’t looking for one might explain that.   I assume that both Mac and pc use interchangeable printers.  I’ve used Epson, Dell, HP and now I have a Kodak printer(all inkjets).  I have no preference–I hate all of them…Printers and downloading are the bane of my existence.  If something CAN go wrong with the printer, it will.  And if there is a way to screw up a download (or even if there isn’t!) I will do it.

 

Well, I came close to adopting another dog.  She is a black Chihuahua named Jasalin, whom I intended to rename Jazz.  She’s 2 years old, maybe too active for Jesse & me.  But the reason I decided not to go through with the adoption is that my damn foot (remember the mosquito bite?) started hurting so badly that I realized I have to see the doctor again and just bite the bullet if he suggests surgery.  I’ve already had my quota of steroid shots.  I decided it would be too hard to ride herd on a new dog on crutches or wearing a surgical boot.  Eventually I will adopt a small female dog so Jesse will have a companion when I board him.  It won’t be nearly so hard to leave him if he has a familiar companion to stay with him.

 

I’ve always thought that my voracious reading had something to do with my “smart scores.”  I don’t ever remember not knowing how to read.  For a couple of summers (maybe 4 and 5?) I was so anemic I spent most of my days on a quilt under the apple tree surrounded by books.  I don’t know how my mother managed to keep me supplied with reading material.  I do remember that near the end of that time I started reading Zane Grey, and developed a lifelong love of westerns.

 

What reaction have you gotten from the flooring company?  

 

So maybe the VWs have Porsche engines….I hate to give up on a metaphor…..

 

 

On Jun 23, 2014, at 12:12 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

So far the flooring company has not deigned to react. A solid week of silence. Well, the marketing guy did tell me he was busy with other stuff and promised to get back to me by last Thursday.

 

Here’s the company’s existing site–http://www.slaughterbeckfloors.com

 

and here’s the rough draft I made for nine new pages: http://colin.org/slaughterbeck/

 

It’s just a thumbnail version–the marketing company’s designers and codeboys are in Croatia and they’re supposed to beautify it. I’m just supplying the content.  If you click on the wood names in the header photo you go to pages about those topics. To get back to the fake home page, click on the Slaughterbeck logo at the top of each page. 

 

I’m having a hard time adjusting to this kind of work…in my days as a print writer, I’d assemble this kind of info and then sit down with the art director to figure out how to sharpen the presentation. We’d battle back and forth about which aspects should be presented first, how big on the page various segments should be, etc., but these days I’m working on a lone mountaintop.   

 

My last few jobs have blown up in my face: the clients expected my first draft to be the final draft. 

They’re people who have never created anything new before and believe in the springing-from-Jove’s-brow theory. Do it right the first time. 

 

Last year I presented the first draft of a new site for a financial planning outfit that was changing its name after some kind of altercation between the partners that led to half of them quitting. They had a new name for the company and a different set of services they wanted to offer. I made a plan and created 23 pages explaining their services, and they fired me after the first draft, with no explanation.

 

Later when the final actual site went into operation, I saw that it was 90% of my writing and 100% of my plan. 

 

Whatever I did to get fired, I’ll never know. I asked, I offered to rewrite anything they wanted, but they had to tell me what was wrong so I could fix it. They disdained to reply. 

 

I had another blowup with a company that makes high-brightness video panels for billboards and advertising displays. The guy told me nobody in the world makes screens as bright as his. I did some research and found ten other companies making exactly the same claims. We can’t just say “we’re the brightest,” I told him, we have to prove it. 

 

He was offended that I wanted him to prove it. Why, he had a patent from 1992, he started this whole goddam industry. Yes, but nobody knows it but you, we have to explain it. No we don’t, he solved that by firing me. Now if you go to his site the headline tells you IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BRIGHTNESS and that’s all you’ll ever learn.  

 

I desperately wanted to put those sites on my resume, a high-end financial services company, a front-edge technology company, but I got broomed without ever finding out what I did wrong. 

 

Oh well it’s been that way my whole life. Back at Sears, I got called into Everett Garey’s office–he’d seen an ad I wrote while he was on vacation, it went out without his approval and he lectured me…”This ad is very creative, Colin,” he said, and I thought he was praising it. Nope: “Creativity is a sign of immaturity.” 

 

Then the manager of the clock & jewelry department came in waving the ad I’d written. “Who wrote this?” he said. 

 

“It was Colin,” Garey said, and started to apologize for letting my swill get through, but the guy said, “I want him writing all my stuff from now on.” 

 

It was an ad for a $2 watch. What can you say about a $2 watch? My headline was “Tick Top Time Tellers.” 

 

“What does that mean, Colin?” was Garey’s question to me. Fuck if I know. But the customers read it and bought the watches like crazy.  I didn’t last much longer at Sears. 

 

 

On Jun 27, 2014, at 1:02 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

As I recall, Everett Garey was one of the black holes of humankind.  I have met others since, but he was one of the first.  I am wary of those people and try to give them a wide berth.  Speaking of Sears, do you remember Sharon Cuppetelli?  I can’t remember if she worked there, or if I just knew her at the same time I worked at Sears.

 

Oddly enough, a generic flooring company surfaced in a dream the other night.  You were not in the dream, but Jerry Cartwright was, plus a man that I went to school with and have not seen in 50 years and some assorted people that I worked with in Seattle in the 80s.  We all worked for a flooring company, and nothing of any import happened in the dream except there were cases and cases of guns displayed along with the flooring…..

 

 I am more than slightly cranky today.  The first thing I did this morning was to call McAfee–and refrained from losing my temper.  I sent them a e-mail in April removing myself from automatic renewal.  Yesterday I received a letter from them “YOU MUST UPDATE YOUR CREDIT CARD INFORMATION NOW.”  Later on in the letter:  “Please note that if you forget to update your billing information, we may obtain your credit card data from your financial institution.”  That was what really ticked me off.  I managed to keep from swearing at the customer service rep, but I did tell her in no uncertain terms that threatening customers was a very poor way to insure return business.

 

Then I called the doctor, who had ordered blood tests when I saw him Monday.  I went straight to the hospital lab that day, but they don’t have the results yet…sigh.  He ordered the tests to make sure I don’t have some systemic infection before he proceeds with steroid shots or surgery or witchcraft….

The doctor’s first name is Borys, and it took all my self-control to keep me from asking if he has a nurse named Natasha.

 

 

On Jun 28, 2014, at 9:32 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Last time I saw Sharon Cuppetelli was when I bumped into her at the Beaumont Hospital emergency room in 1975. I think it was her father who was receiving emergency treatment, not her. I don’t recall what we talked about. We’d had some arguments when we were at Sears but whatever those issues had been, they did not re-arise. I remember that her birthday is one day before or after yours. 

 

I saw a couple of the Sears people when I was working at BBDO in Detroit–a photography company had a Christmas party, the same  company that hosted the party with that photo of me and Jerry Cartwright back in 1967. They were the head of the art department, Jon Simon, and a copywriter, Charley Frendo. I always got along okay with Jon Simon, but after I altered Charley’s nameplate to say “Charley Fiendo” he and I didn’t get along. 

 

The only thing I remember about that encounter was that they were still complaining about the same stupid shit they’d been complaining about ten years before, whining and puling about it, and this time they were so fed up they were going to quit and go freelance, the exact claims they’d always been making. It just underlined for me how correct I’d been to bail out of that place. 

 

Not that BBDO was much better…except, the pay was extremely better!  BBDO: Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, the ad agency whose name sounds like a body falling down the stairs.  

 

Although I was in the Creative Department, we weren’t allowed to create much. At one meeting we were told all of our suggestions for a new Dodge Dealer campaign were rejected, and the new mandate was to resurrect either the “Dodge Boys In White Hats” from the 1950s or the “Dodge Girl” from the 1960s. I fumed about it and kind of foamed at the mouth and yelled that we could combine the two into a fresh new campaign, “The White Clits Are Back,” and that ended the meeting. A big silence. I didn’t get fired, though. 

 

In fact, the ad agency got fired by Chrysler a few months later when Lee Iacocca took over. I had job offers from several other Detroit agencies with car accounts, but I knew that all the other agencies were just the same as BBDO, after hanging out with Scott and his pals from the Buick and Pontiac agencies. 

 

Also, there was a high suicide rate in the Detroit ad biz, as I found out on my first day at BBDO. The supervisor took me to my office and then introduced me around to the rest of the Creative Department, and they were all distracted and distant. It was several days before I found out that the agency almost always hired in twos, a writer and an art director, and the new art director was supposed to have started that day, too, but instead, on the night before we were to begin, he jumped off the roof of the 16-story building. 

 

And then, after I decided to leave town, Scott threw a going-away party for me, but it became a dark affair when another art director suicided that day and people found out about it when they arrived at the party. The art director’s girlfriend wore widow’s weeds and she was the main center of attention at my party, grump. 

 

 

Meanwhile, back in today, the flooring company apparently likes my stuff well enough and they sent me a check and I’m able to pay the rent!  The same old month to month rollercoaster. 

 

Automatic renewal is a widespread scam, especially in these days when companies isolate themselves from customer contact–Web sites with no phone number listed, etc. My only recourse a couple of times has been to call my bank and tell them to cancel my current card number and issue me a new one. 

 

I went to the doctor a few weeks ago for my annual exam to re-up my blood pressure meds. He was once again unable to find anything wrong with me. Mostly he wanted advice about his Macintosh laptop. He’s in a funk about his business since ObamaCare went into effect and he doesn’t know what to do. He told me about his big investment with a “green fertilizer” company that has landed a huge contract with the Chinese equivalent of the Agriculture Department, and if the IPO goes through it will vest his shares and he can retire and stop having to hang out with sick people. 

 

What is it with the Spokane mosquitoes that make them so poisonous?  Or is it your compromised immune system causing the trouble? 

 

Have you tried any alternative therapies?  

 

Nuke says to tell you he’s feeling much better now. 

 

 

On Jul 9, 2014, at 9:14 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

Are you okay?

Or just tired of our correspondence? 

 

 

On Jul 11, 2014, at 12:33 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I got the re-send of your 6/28 email yesterday, along with 2 emails from Michigan sent around the holiday.  I’ll be short with this one just to let you know I got them.  Tell Nuke I’m glad he’s feeling better. More later today…

 

 

On Jul 11, 2014, at 7:49 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I don’t know why I don’t get some emails–aol has been otherwise unpredictable for the last couple of weeks.  Since you didn’t understand my previous attempts to describe what happens with my screens, I will try again.  I sign on (to Windows? Gateway?) and my Windows 8 rectangles appear.  I click on the Bing rectangle and a Search field appears.  I type in aol.com, and several windows fill the screen.  I click on “my aol” and either a sign-in field appears or a screen showing “unable to show this website 403.” I click on “start”, Bing, my aol, and the sign-in screen reappears.  At any point that “403” screen may show up, and the easiest way to get back to where I was is to retrace my steps.  (When I first typed “screens” in this paragraph, I replaced the n with an m–maybe more accurate??)

 

I told you before that I hate printers–case in point:  I clicked to print your 6/28 email and walked away to get something to drink.  I’d forgotten that the printer will print EVERY email attached to the “more later” thread–15 pages.  Ok, ok, I get it.  However, the first 2 pages had print only in the middle 2″ of the paper.  Next 2 pages–2-1/2 inches. Next 2–3″. Next 4 pages–4″.  Next 3 pages–5-1/2 inches.  Remainder of printing (including Nuke’s picture) normal margins, so 7-/12 inches of print.  I tossed the history and put Nuke’s picture on the filing cabinet next to a picture of Jim’s dog Bo.  When I sit down tomorrow to actually address your last email, I will have a hard copy in front of me–much easier than checking back onscreen.

 

The medical issues I have been dealing with have all stemmed from that blood test I had late in June–my white count was high, so Dr. Borys prescribed 10 days of Cipro.   Either it caused a severe flare-up of joint pain, or the hot weather (90+ every day since July 1) caused it, or maybe nothing caused it–maybe the joint pain just flared on its own.  I don’t know.  I have just been miserable for the last couple of weeks.  I’ll be through with the germ poison tomorrow, and hopefully will feel better.  I will also send you an email that actually addresses your last email.  Now I’m repeating myself, so I’m going to take Jesse outside and then put us both to bed. 

 

 

On Jul 11, 2014, at 9:29 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I asked about your problem at Barbaria, an on-line hangout for us ex-Santa Barbara geeks who were in on the early (1980s) days of the Internet:

 

Stupid questions> read New 

 

 Jul 11 2014 9:14pm from colin campbell 

    My ex, Rhonda, hasn’t been getting emails lately. She’s a computer dope and I’m a Windows dope. Does any of this mean anything?   

 

   “I don’t know why I don’t get some emails–aol has been otherwise 

unpredictable for the last couple of weeks.  Since you didn’t understand my 

previous attempts to describe what happens with my screens, I will try again.  

I sign on (to Windows? Gateway?) and my Windows 8 rectangles appear.  I click on the Bing rectangle and a Search field appears.  I type in aol.com, and several windows fill the screen.  I click on “my aol” and either a sign-in field appears or a screen showing “unable to show this website 403.” I click on “start”, Bing, my aol, and the sign-in screen reappears.  At any point that “403” screen may show up, and the easiest way to get back to where I was is to retrace my steps.”  

                                                                               

 Jul 11 2014 9:30pm from gwar 

Tell her to stop doing it back-asswards.  If you want to go to a website, open a web browser, not a bing search rectangle.  Internet Explorer has a “windows 8 rectangle”.  Then put aol.com in the address bar, not the bing search bar.  Then click “sign in” on the top right if she’s not automatically signed in.  

 

 

 

 

On Jul 12, 2014, at 9:11 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I will try this next time.  Thanks!

 

I don’t know why the name “Jon Simon” seems familiar to me–I can’t summon up a face or voice to go with it.  Also, the last time I remember seeing Sharon was at Beaumont Hospital, but I don’t remember seeing you there.  Another time puzzle…

 

I sounds like the auto ad biz in Detroit was detrimental to survival back then–70s, 80s?  Wonder what happened during the latest crash?  Some of the slogans in the last few years have been notable:  “Guts, Glory, RAM” and “Imported from Detroit” hmmm…those are both Chrysler.  

 

Glad to hear your roller-coaster car has ratcheted up to the top again thanks to the flooring company.  

I had one more dream set in the imaginary flooring company, but it was more focused on the guns than the flooring.  

 

I learned my lesson with the McAfee mess–no more automatic renewal unless I’m absolutely positive I will want the service in the future.  I was ready to call and get a new credit card issued, but I have my number and expiration date and code memorized, so I decided to try and deal with it from the provider end.  So far, so good.

 

Negative findings on an annual exam–that’s a good thing.  I’m satisfied if the doctor tells me nothing has gotten any worse.  As for the Spokane mosquitoes being poisonous–nah.  I don’t see people falling left and right with killer mosquito bites.  I think it’s my immune system, or lack thereof.  I have tried Benadryl (in the beginning), DMSO, kinoki pads (at bedtime on bottoms of feet), Epsom salt soaks and cold and warm compresses.  The kinoki pads help reduce the swelling at night, and the 3 oz of tart 

cherries I eat every day for their anti-inflammatory effect help to control the swelling also.  Nothing has ever helped the dark spot about the size of a quarter just in front of my outboard ankle bone, and it stays swollen no matter what.

 

 

 


On Jul 13, 2014, at 6:27 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

With all due respect to your Barbarian friend, his path to aol has its problems, too.  For instance, after I try to sign on to aol my way and get the “website declines to show this page” screen, all I have to do is bip back through my original steps and the sign-on works or at least I get another try at signing on.  Using his method:  when the “website declines…” screen, that is a termination.  Then I have to go back to start, Internet explorer, retype aol.com and there’s no guarantee it will work the second time!  My way works the second time 95% of the time.

 

It’s almost like a gravy recipe with identical ingredients, but one cook whisks it clockwise and another cook insists that the only right way is to whisk it counterclockwise.  Each thinks the other is doing it back-asswards…:-)

 

 


On Jul 13, 2014, at 5:50 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Stupid questions> Last five msgs 

 

 Jul 12 2014 10:23am from colin campbell 

     Thanks, Gwar.  She says she’ll try your method next time.  

 

 Jul 12 2014 2:48pm from jello viagra 

It’s like if you went to the altavista.com search engine and typed in 

“colin.org” every time you wanted to check your mail.  Probably the first 

listings to come up would not be the webmail interface for colin.org, but you 

habitually clicked the first listing anyway.

 

 Jul 12 2014 3:00pm from colin campbell 

    It’s all Windows to me…  

                                                                               

 Jul 13 2014 8:36am from colin campbell 

    I’m just lost because I have nearly zero experience with Windows 8. Here’s 

what she says now:   

   

 With all due respect to your Barbarian friend, his path to aol has its 

problems, too.  For instance, after I try to sign on to aol my way and get the 

“website declines to show this page” screen, all I have to do is bip back 

through my original steps and the sign-on works or at least I get another try 

at signing on.  Using his method:  when the “website declines…” screen, that 

is a termination.  Then I have to go back to start, Internet explorer, retype 

aol.com and there’s no guarantee it will work the second time!  My way works 

the second time 95% of the time.  

                                                                               

 Jul 13 2014 10:21am from salamander 

Tell her to Get A Mac.   

                                                                               

 Jul 13 2014 10:49am from colin campbell 

    I’ve never heard of the “website declines to show this page” alert. My 

ignorance of Windows 8 is compounded by my ignorance of AOL. And Internet 

Explorer, for that matter.   

                                                                               

 Jul 13 2014 6:31pm from jello viagra 

I think I would need a sequence of screenshots to follow what she’s saying.  

 

 

 

On Jul 14, 2014, at 3:06 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

You know, everything is WORKING at this end, whether or not it’s working the way your uber geek friends think it should.  All this discussion has no bearing on the fact that sometimes your emails don’t get through.  I think….

 

No pearls of wisdom today…the doctor decided to try another steroid shot in a slightly different spot in my ankle, and it is very painful.  So, I am going to sign off and get up close & personal with some pain medication…..

 

 

 

On Jul 16, 2014, at 9:36 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’ve spent the day trying to update my Macintosh to a new operating system, sigh. It was working fine until I started updating it.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll be back to normal. Right now I’m watching the screen tick down after the umpteenth re-start.

 

Luckily I have a laptop Mac so my computer addiction can continue unbroken. 

 

Hope your steroid shot did the trick.  I’ve mostly avoided doctors in my life except for trauma repair…I’m leery of doctors, they want to pad the bill just like any other tradesman. You want a facelift with that? 

 

Fresh air and sunshine and exercise, that’s my medicine. 

 

On Jul 26, 2014, at 2:55 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I am back online, but not for long today.  I moved some furniture around in addition to setting up the new computer, and I am exhausted.  And–it must be nice to only need fresh air, etc., to stay healthy.  I only need trauma repair too.  It’s my immune system that inflicts the trauma on me…..

 

On Jul 27, 2014, at 11:23 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Welcome back to the Web. I’ve never been away from it in the last 25 years–I’ve always had a spare computer on hand if my main machine broke. Also, I’ve never been a lightning magnet. 

 

When I was working at the BBDO Detroit ad agency, I often went to the roof of the 18-story building to smoke dope. The roof was covered with an array of hundreds of three-foot high metal rods with sharp points: lightning rods. I’ve never seen this portrayed in movies; it would be a great location for the final chase where the villain could gruesomely impale himself in hand-to-hand struggle. 

 

Who knows why immune systems differ. I was profoundly influenced by the interview I did with Dr. Horvath at the Stress Institute way back when (http://colin.org/NonFiction/Stress/stress.html) and I became a stress-seeker. Hmm, I notice that in the article, my resting heart rate was 75; today, after 35 years of constant bicycling, my resting rate is 60. 

 

I’ve mentioned my theory that breaking bones stimulates them into higher immune readiness. When I was a kid I had relatives with an apple orchard with peach trees interspersed between the apple trees. Peach trees don’t live as long as apples, and one year the owner gave me and Scott shotguns and told us to go through the orchard and give a shotgun blast to the trunk of every peach tree. You can imagine how reluctant we were to do that. What a romp. 

 

Orchard owners had seen that elderly trees struck by lightning seemed to rejuvenate: the stress revived them. I never found out if our shotgunning had a similar effect…

 

Some studies suggest that Crohn’s Disease is a result of a too-clean infancy: without enough bacterial enemies to fight, the immune system turns on its own body. I spent my childhood wallowing in farm filth and maybe that’s why my immune system is so well-tuned…except, my sibs had exactly the same environment, and Lanie died of immune system problems and Mary is presently plagued with some kind of skin crap that is marching up from her hands toward her elbows. Scott is facing hip replacement surgery–he’s already had a knee replaced. 

 

So maybe it’s just a roll of the dice as to who gets smitten and who doesn’t. 

 

Thanks for the photos. You still look like you.

 

 

 

 

———————————

 

 

On Oct 12, 2014, at 8:38 AM, <msrnmorley@aol.com> <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Did you get that e-mail or am I jumping the gun here?

 

Sent from Windows Mail

 

<Nuke-chasing-tail-4.jpg>

 

 

On Oct 12, 2014, at 9:04 AM, <msrnmorley@aol.com> <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:



The last e-mail I got from you was sent on Oct 4, regarding the Sigma website, except, obviously, for the one I got just now.  I did get the one you sent with the cartoons.  AND, although I don’t remember the exact subjects, I remember seeing you draw cartoons. 

 

Sent from Windows Mail

 

From: colin@colin.org
Sent: ‎Sunday‎, ‎October‎ ‎12‎, ‎2014 ‎8‎:‎36‎ ‎AM
To: msrnmorley@aol.com
Cc: colin@colin.org

 

I’ve sent two emails since then, one on 10/7, and then a few days later a Mailer Daemon reported a non-delivery of an email so I sent it again. 

 

Let me know if this one gets through, maybe there’s a glitch in one of the pictures in that email.

 

 

From: colin@colin.org
Sent: ‎Sunday‎, ‎October‎ ‎12‎, ‎2014 ‎9‎:‎08‎ ‎AM
To: msrnmorley@aol.com
Cc: colin@colin.org

 

I’ll try again. Here’s the text of my 10/7 email, with pictures removed:

 

I’d be very surprised if you’d ever heard the name “Sigma Designs.”  This is what they make:

 

(picture of computer chip)

 

Stick one of these chips into your garage door opener, and you’ll be able to control it with your iPhone. 

 

Not “you”, of course–they sell the chips to the manufacturers of garage door openers. But they don’t want to tell that to investors. They want exotic buzzwords that will knock investors prone and pop open their wallets. 

 

“Disruptive” is the latest buzzword. We have disruptive solutions! Colin’s theory is to amaze visitors with plain facts and truth, and zero bullshit. In today’s cacophony of hype and bluster, plain clear facts can rivet the attention. But no, companies are uncomfortable revealing a thing about themselves and scurry back to warm, expansive self-congratulation. 

 

(cartoon of self-praise)

 

Hope your foot is getting better. My own therapy techniques have revolved around the idea of the body part as an operational system, and I’ve tried to keep the part operational to force my body to heal it faster. It’s worked pretty well with broken bones–the more stress the bones are under, the faster and better they heal. 

 

One third of people who have the kind of hip surgery I had, are dead within one year. According to the doctors, it’s because the patients stop moving. They turn into couch potatoes and their bodies turn into a collection of non-functional parts. 

 

I went to the Bruttles site but suffered none of the pop-up window attacks. I don’t know if it is because (a) I have pop-ups disabled, (b) it’s a Mac vs. PC thing, (c) the Bruttles web operators fixed the problem.

 

I looked at the source code of the Bruttles site and it is not a WordPress template site–my pal Diego told me that there’s a WordPress-attacking worm going around, and several of the WordPress-based sites he administers were hit by it: an attack that inserts evil code into a WordPress flaw and take over a site to present their own scam. One of the latest tricks is “ransom-ware”–it takes over your site/screen and won’t go away until you pay $100.  A skilled coder can get rid of it, but skilled coders charge more than $100. 

 

I suggested “Smegma” to Dodge, years ago. They asked us at BBDO for names for a new two-seater car; I’d never named a car before and launched into the project with vigor. I made a list of ten names and so did each of the other Creatives on staff…their names were good, too, and yet Chrysler rejected every one of them without comment. More names were requested. I made another list of names redolent of powerful predatory animals and devastating weather phenomena. Not good enough.

 

After several more interations I lost interest. There was no feedback as to what was warm and what was close, where we were missing, what they were after. It wasn’t just my submissions that were ignored, everybody else was submitting terrific possible names.  So I finally submitted a list of ten of the most wrong names I could think of, including the New Dodge Smegma, see it at your friendly local authorized Dodge dealer today!

 

A week later, Chrysler had no further comment except a request for another list of names. This time I went downstairs to the lobby of the office building where they had a magazine stand and a rack of paperback books, including a paperback dictionary, and I bought the dictionary and put it into a delivery envelope to the Chrysler contact person with a note saying “I’ve got the exact right word, right here! Be sure to choose wisely!”

 

 

 

On Oct 12, 2014, at 9:19 AM, <msrnmorley@aol.com> <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I must say I don’t get “disruptive” as a buzzword–I would think there are more negative connotations than positive.  Are they trying to sell themselves as “bad boys?”  I just don’t get a lot of the current slang, such as “sick.”  And half the time when people say something is “surreal,” they really mean that it is surprising, or out of place.  As far as overuse and misuse goes, surreal is the new awesome.

 

I think my foot would have healed faster if I had broken a bone.  Insulted tissue just keeps swelling.  Activity makes it worse, but inactivity disrupts the rest of my joint functioning, so it’s kind of a balancing act.  When I had knee surgery for a torn meniscus, the doctor emphasized that if I did not do the recommended rehab, I would probably not walk without pain.  I chose to do it at home, with prescribed exercises and an exercise bicycle (it was the dead of winter) and I got back my range of motion and function rather quickly.  I don’t know what to do differently to speed up this damn foot.

The doctor and I are going to have a discussion about that on Thursday.

 

I have more to say, but I have things going on in the kitchen that require my attention.

More later.

Sent from Windows Mail

 

 

From: colin@colin.org
Sent: ‎Sunday‎, ‎October‎ ‎12‎, ‎2014 ‎11‎:‎26‎ ‎AM
To: msrnmorley@aol.com
Cc: colin@colin.org

 

“Disruptive” is an attempt for unearned self-praise. “Our innovation will prove to be as important as the introduction of the automobile, the telephone, and the electric light bulb.” 

 

Plus, if you claim to be disruptive, that excuses you from the necessity of explaining exactly what your innovation is.  A few months ago I got fired from that CMIC project because saying “CMIC is disruptive” was enough to imprint their message into the consciousness of the nation, so who needed a copywriter.

 

I had another project come in, only this time it looks like they’re on my wavelength. A company had three “white papers” about aspects of Big Data that they’re proud of, and they wanted the papers trimmed from 900 words to 550 words to fit into a Web format for publication.  I chopped away the jargon, rearranged everything to put first things first, and was expecting the usual horrified response, but this time, the VP Finance in New York said, “Big fan of the new flow. Much more to the point.”

 

Now the local Web design shop loves me.  I’m hoping that this will be a turning point for me…Silicon Valley has been indifferent to my skills as a copywriter because graphics companies and ad agencies and Web design shops just accept whatever words the client supplies, these days, and they’re afraid that telling the client that their text sucks is a way to lose the client. 

 

So today copywriters are the equivalent of elevator operators and TV repairmen. I’ve looked at the home pages of hundreds of Web/graphics shops in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about .5% of them have a copywriter on staff. It’s no longer a service being offered. 

 

 

As for healing…I guess it’s a fine line between activity/inactivity …one time I broke my left collarbone while attempting a diving catch in a softball game; two weeks later I was back on the field as a pitcher, promising to just play easy during a practice game, but then a batter lined one right at my head and I reflexively stopped it with my glove and re-broke the collarbone.  After that I caved in and didn’t play softball for five more weeks. 

 

Nuke has never suffered an injury even while trying to jump over his own tail.

 

<Nuke-chasing-tail-4.jpg>

 

On Oct 12, 2014, at 11:49 AM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:



OK, I get that use of disruptive.  In the context they’re using it, it’s silly, but I get it.  Congrats on condensing the white papers, and I hope it is a turning point for you.  I didn’t check the bruttles web site again, as I ordered some by phone on Monday.  Interestingly enough, my credit union called me two days later and said they had stopped a charge on my VISA for 29.95 and did I authorize it?  No, there was a legit charge for 29.95 on October 3, but none on the 7th.  So–they cancelled my card and it will be a few days before I have a new one.

 

Once again, law-abiding citizens have to jump through hoops and be inconvenienced because of the actions of criminals.  I feel a rant coming on–I’ll be brief.  I have to go to the pharmacy counter and sign for pseudoephedrine because people use it to make meth.  As of this month, I have to have a signed prescription EVERY time I need a refill of Norco, because addicts get high on it.  I don’t make fraudulent charges on my credit card, I don’t cook meth, and if I take 2 Norco at one time, I get sick, not high.  So why does all this fall on the shoulders of law-abiding citizens?? A rhetorical question, and this rant is officially over.

 

I am glad Nuke doesn’t trip over his own tail.  KC jumped for an open cabinet door in the 5th wheel one day and missed, and fell far enough that it scared me.  By the time I put down my book and got up to see if he was hurt, he was sitting on the dining table, nonchalantly cleaning his ears.  Fall?  Who fell?  Must have been RC….

 

 

From: colin@colin.org
Sent: ‎Thursday‎, ‎October‎ ‎16‎, ‎2014 ‎9‎:‎17‎ ‎PM
To: msrnmorley@aol.com
Cc: colin@colin.org

 

You don’t cook meth? What, you just take it raw? 

 

I haven’t yet been inconvenienced by such pharmacy paperwork. Addicts have not found a purpose for the lisinopril and hydrochlorothiazide pills I take each day to control high blood pressure, and I use no other drugstore wares. 

           

As a libertarian I would prefer all drug laws to be scrapped. Virtually all illegal drug overdoses are caused by mislabeled or adulterated drugs.  And the majority of overdose deaths are from legitimately prescribed drugs. 

 

The evils of the drug laws far exceed the evils of drug abuse. The FDA prevents effective drugs from reaching patients here, drugs that have been proven efficacious in Europe, and authorizes drugs that turn out to be killers. 

 

I saw a factoid that fifty years ago, one job in 20 required a government permit or license of some sort, and today it’s one job in 3.  

 

My brother Matt owned a car repair shop in Santa Barbara. When he started out, he stored used oil from oil changes in a 55-gallon drum. Every so often a guy with a small tanker truck would come around and buy the used oil from Matt. 

 

Then the California government enacted fresh laws, and the used oil was collected by a state-licensed guy, and Matt had to pay the state for each gallon of oil. Then the state added a second guy, who chemically tested the oil and if it had various levels of pollutants he was fined extra for each gallon. So he was penalized if his customers used illegal additives in their engines. 

 

One day he and I went to lunch. He closed down the shop for lunch, and when we got back, somebody had left a five-gallon pail of used oil on his doorstep. It was the last straw, and he closed his shop soon after. Not that one pail of oil was going to ruin him, just another $15 or $20 ding, but it was part of the endless string of useless intrusions…the state of California required him to publish an earthquake-preparedness manual for his employees.  “I don’t have any employees,” he said. That was no excuse!

 

Hey, what do you know, the San Francisco Giants won the pennant! Some second-stringer forced into the game because of an injury to the regular left fielder hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth and Giants are going to the World Series for the third time in the last five seasons. I guess I’ll never recover from being a baseball fan. 

 

 

On Oct 18, 2014, at 8:23 AM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

Raw meth:  left over when you make a thalad. 

 

You should feel very lucky that you only need high blood pressure medication.  I am surprised that you do, given the fact that you ride your bike on a regular basis.  But then, much of our physical health is dependent on genetics–the luck of the draw, so to speak.  Genetic research is really just on the threshold of discovery, especially when it comes to more than one gene working in concert and/or environmental triggers, etc.  When I was diagnosed with breast cancer and the surgeon found out that I had had ovarian cancer as well, she advised that I be tested for the BRACA 1 and 2 gene mutations.  I did that, and do not have either mutation.  If I had, the lumpectomy would not have been a viable choice, as the risk of recurrence would have been in the low 90 percent.  So I am grateful for that, and take my tamoxifen every night (along with a Zantac, as  it is hard on my stomach.)  They don’t give exact percentages, but taking tamoxifen for 10 years after breast cancer treatment improves the chances of surviving for 10 years by more than 15%. 

 

I agree with scrapping the drug laws.  The people who would die of overdoses would have probably met that fate eventually anyway.  Big Pharma would have to find other ways of making money.  The FDA is a joke.  

 

I remembered your saying that you were still a baseball fan, and I knew you told me which team.  I was 90% sure it was the Giants.  So!  The World Series–I am sure you recall the World Series of 1969, Tigers vs Cardinals, when we were both working at Sears.  I was rooting for the Cardinals, and I seem to recall being a minority of one…

I really don’t follow baseball anymore.

 

 

From: colin@colin.org
Sent: ‎Tuesday‎, ‎October‎ ‎21‎, ‎2014 ‎8‎:‎33‎ ‎PM
To: msrnmorley@aol.com
Cc: colin@colin.org

 

I seem to be stuck with being a baseball fan. My sibs have shed their fandom but I’m still engrossed with the game. When I arrived in Santa Barbara in 1975, the Dodgers were just starting a fabulous string of World Series appearances and it was easy to swap over to being a Dodger fan, especially because the Dodgers are National League where the pitcher has to bat, unlike the wussy American League with their Designated HItter, ick. 

           

I started the first Rotisserie Baseball league in California in 1987–today it’s called Fantasy Baseball.  I did it for six years: every Wednesday USA Today published the full stats of every player and pitcher in the majors, and I entered all the stats into my Excel spreadsheet. By hand. There was no internet feed to download the stats. For a while I contemplated expanding it into a full-time job, but it was pretty much illegal. So I kept it small. I never missed a weekly report despite broken ribs, collarbone, and fingers over the years. 

 

I gave it up when I moved to San Francisco–by then, the Internet had roared into life and national outfits took over the fantasy baseball universe. By that time the Dodgers were a tattered remnant and the Giants had just signed Barry Bonds and I happily switched allegiance. The Dodgers have  never been back to the Series while this is the Giants’ fourth trip since I’ve been here. I even went to a World Series game in 2002, back when tickets were only $145.

 

 http://colin.org/Photos/2002Photos/WorldSeries/WorldSeries.html

 

At this moment I’m watching the Giants trounce the Kansas City Royals 7-1 in the eighth inning in Game One. 

 

You are wrong about the 1969 World Series–that was the Mets vs. Orioles. Tigers vs. Cardinals was 1968. I always assumed you were rooting for the Cardinals solely to be in opposition to me. 

 

 

On Oct 23, 2014, at 6:48 PM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

Guess what?  My allegiance in the 1968 World Series wasn’t about you at all.  Men are prone to think that any failure to support THEIR team is a personal affront.  Faced the same thing from ol’ Bob:  I was a Bears fan from way back, but he actually got MAD because I didn’t support his beloved Raiders.  He finally made me so mad that I told him the only thing the Raiders had worth watching was Lyle Alzado’s ass.  That kind of put a stop to that argument, at least…

 

My supporting the Cardinals had something to do with my Mom, although I know she was a Red Sox fan.  I remember telling her that I was a little uncomfortable being in a crowd of Tiger supporters, so she brought out the old saw: “If they all jumped off a hundred foot cliff, would you jump too?”  I just can’t remember exactly why I wanted to root for the Cardinals–maybe it had something to do with Bob Gibson and Lou Brock.  My cousin, Tracy Stallard, had a short stint with the Cardinals, but that was back in the mid-60s, after he had pitched Roger Maris’s 61st home run ball to him in 1961.  I can’t see that having anything to do with my support of the Cardinals in 1968.

 

By all rights, I should have remained a fanatic baseball fan.  My father used to keep stats by hand on baseball players–I remember sitting on his lap at age three or so while he entered statistics on Roy Campanella, Joe DiMaggio and others as we listened to the radio.  I learned patience from those sessions, as I was only allowed to remain on his lap if I stayed silent.   I remember asking my dad after one game if our last name could be Campanella–I guess I thought it was just a cool name.

 

I clicked on the Series ticket, and got that.  But when I clicked on a name in that text, I got some Israeli young woman’s chat room…….And it wasn’t Ziva!!

 

 

From: colin@colin.org
Sent: ‎Friday‎, ‎October‎ ‎24‎, ‎2014 ‎7‎:‎44‎ ‎PM
To: msrnmorley@aol.com
Cc: colin@colin.org

 

Colin in 1968 was probably just dubious that a girl knew anything about baseball. I met you only a few days before the Tigers clinched the pennant…it wasn’t that I wanted you to root for the Tigers, it was that I thought you had no true partisanship but were just being antipathetic toward whatever that loudmouth guy at work was in favor of. 

 

I don’t demand that anybody support the teams I’m in favor of, or be interested in the sport at all. The year before, one of the guys in the Sears ad production department bet a thousand dollars on the Cardinals and boy was he jittery as the Red Sox stretched it to the seventh game.  His deep sweating interest in the games made them even more interesting to me although I had no partisanship.  

 

Later you told me you liked Mike Shannon and he was a top player, you didn’t pick him just for his name or something, and even more later you told me about your relation to Tracy Stallard…over the years I told many people about your link to Maris’s home run. But not about the singing Stallard SIsters. 

 

I suppose my interest in baseball was linked to my father…he was a terrific player, the catcher and center fielder on a champion fast-pitch softball team. When he was coming home from Europe on a slow troop ship in the summer of 1945, he was able to listen to the Game of the Week. The War Department expedited Tiger first baseman Hank Greenberg’s return to the USA (ahead of ordinary GIs like my dad) and Greenberg came back to the team after the All Star break and immediately began banging the ball and led the Tigers to the pennant and then to the World Series, and it was great for morale so lots of Tiger games got broadcast on the Armed Forces Network. 

 

And then a year after that World Series, I was born, and six years later my father vanished from my life except for occasional Sunday visits during which he listened to Tiger games. I became a student of the game to have something in common with him, I guess. 

 

Late in his life we talked a lot of baseball because I knew tons of stuff about the history of the Tigers, the players on the teams when he was growing up.  

 

In 1968 I still thought Ty Cobb was the greatest player of all time, but today I grudgingly acknowledge that Babe Ruth was better. I wrote a sci-fi story about Babe Ruth…http://www.swagazine.com/issue3/4.html

 

Anyway, I don’t recall that you and I ever went to a major league ballgame. I remember that you were the umpire at a softball game in Anaheim in 1972 and called me out at the plate (even though the catcher never tagged me as I slid into home) because you thought it was a force play, but it wasn’t.

 

Right now I’m looking at Game 3,  Kansas City Royals 3,  San Francisco Giants 2 in the seventh inning. In a few days it will all be over and I’ll be back to digesting my own innards worrying about work.  I was beating the bushes all week and maybe I have a couple of projects, or maybe not.  

 

A doctor wants a Web site and a brochure presenting himself as The Sleep Test Doctor, but he doesn’t want to pay anything. 

 

The company for whom I wrote a couple of Big Data white papers wants 5 more, except they want me to write them from scratch this time instead of just fixing up what some other writer did. They want my bid first, and then they’ll tell me what the project entails. I don’t even know what the topics of the five “Solution Briefs” are supposed to be.  

 

People are always asking me how much I’d charge to write something, and when I say, “Well, what is it that you want written?” they get all huffy and tell everybody that Colin is hard to work with.  

 

 


On Oct 27, 2014, at 10:24 AM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

Rhonda in 1968 was dubious about a lot of things.  I have been immersed in the life and times of Harry Potter for the past few days.  I think I told you I had read 2-1/2 books several years ago, and then decided to start over last month.  I read the first four, and then last week I borrowed the last three books from a friend.  I basically sat down and read those last three books with hardly a break to eat!  J K Rowling created a world that has such structural integrity that, fairly soon into the tale, the reader knows that a certain curse won’t work inside, or that only a specific curse will repel certain bad guys.  I am as impressed with her writing skill as I am with her creations.  She also tied up the major plot lines in the last chapter.  

 

So now what am I going to read?  Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher novel is still only available in hardback–if I had made a practice of buying hardback books, I’d be bankrupt AND buried in books.  Hardbacks are also hard for me to hold–creaky fingers.

 

I don’t see how someone can expect you to quote a price on an unknown project–that’s like going to an orchard and asking for a price on apples without specifying a pound or a bushel.  Silly people.

 

 

On Oct 27, 2014, at 12:02 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

If you need something to read, here’s the greatest cat story in sci-fi history, “Spacetime for Springers” by Fritz Leiber

 

On Oct 29, 2014, at 11:27 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I haven’t used the apples analogy…usually I tell people it’s like asking how much a piece of rope costs. How long? How thick? Synthetic or sisal? Oh, you’re just being difficult, Colin. 

 

Or, how much would you charge to fix my car? Well what’s wrong with it? 

 

How much would you charge to paint a house? And I’m evil for asking “exterior or interior?” or “how many rooms?”

 

It’s as though people think I have a brochure about their asynchronous pollywog transfixer already on my shelf and I just have to dust it off and put their name on it. 

 

Presently I’m in communication with a Mr. Puneet Thapliyal regarding text for Verasynth’s new “API Firewall as a Service” product.  It’s a completely reinvented solution, see, an innovative breakthrough technology. It’s so big and important that it is beneath us to speak of it in other than abstract adoration of its multiple capacities. Instead, their existing text talks about how terrible all the competitors are. Buy now!

 

Another possible project is a site for a doctor who wants to become known as the Sleep Test Doctor. He’s too busy to talk to me, and the project is far behind schedule and it’s already my fault for not telepathically downloading what it is that he wants to say. 

 

Perhaps this afternoon I will have a cup of coffee with a guy who runs a business that comes to your house and fixes the bent rims on your car wheels. 

 

Meanwhile, at least I can state with confidence that my cat has stripes. 

 

 

 

On Nov 1, 2014, at 7:25 AM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

I think Nuke was just channeling his inner referee? Umpire?  

 

I’ve been dealing with my very own personal black hole for the last few days, so I haven’t even turned on my computer until this morning.  I didn’t see any of the games, but I see your Giants won again.  One of the morning weather people here in Spokane was born in Kansas City and is a devout Royals fan, so she kept everyone up to date whether we watched sports or not.

 

Jesse is being picky about his food.  So far he’s rejected 2 different dry foods, 1 premium and 1 grocery store brand.  I started mixing some wet food with the dry, and he’s eaten that so far.  I never had a cat get picky over food.  Merry ate dry Science Diet with great enthusiasm all her life. 

 

So has the Sleep Test doctor talked to you yet?  I would find it tremendously irritating to deal with someone like that.  Patience is in short supply here–you must have more than I do…

 

 

On Nov 4, 2014, at 6:35 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I hope your black hole has abated. I don’t understand what turning your computer on has to do with it, though. Is your monitor a window into the particular black hole? 

 

There hasn’t been a day this century in which I didn’t turn on my computer. I live inside my computer(s).  Sunday I drove 45 miles to Alameda for pizza and TV with my pals Misha, Maria, and John, the same crew I watched the Super Bowl with, and it was my first social visit with anybody since the Super Bowl. 

 

I bicycled my usual ten miles today and I believe that it is my exercise that keeps my depression at bay, so I don’t have that kind of black hole. I of course have a rational depressed feeling about my lack of customers right now, and for the last six years, but it’s not the same as clinical depression. 

 

I still haven’t figured out why I’m not successful. Some of my projects in the past were giant screaming successes, and I expected that people would flock to me to ask for more of the same, but instead the successes were dead ends for me. 

 

I was slightly mollified by reading ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE by William Goldman.  He kept having his screenplays revised by the star’s limo driver and dismissed from a production at the slightest sign of spunk even after he won Academy Awards for writing BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID and then ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN. 

 

Not that my stuff is up to that level, but the scorn for the writer is the same at every level all the way to the top. There was a stock phrase from the account representatives at the BBDO advertising agency where I worked in Detroit: if a writer protested about changes in the text, the account men said, “This ain’t the Bible, kiddo,” as though we had grandiose opinions about our work instead of merely trying to point out grammatical and syntactical errors in the new finished product, along with mis-statements of fact and omissions of crucial information. 

 

I visited the Sleep Doctor and interviewed him for an hour and a half. For the first hour I found out all kinds of interesting stuff about apnea and its treatment.  Then Dr. Shetty informed me that he actually has not done all that much sleep therapy and he took over the practice of a doctor who retired in July, a pulmonary therapist, and maybe he should just stick with the pulmonary stuff. Or maybe I should write two brochures for him, one on apnea and one on pulmonary. 

 

Well, I’m here to do one brochure, doc, I told him, and you tell me which one you want. And I require 50% in advance. 

 

Well, that killed the whole deal. Or maybe not, who knows. The design agency who sent me to the sleep doctor called and said they and the doctor are haggling over who is going to write the check to me. Or if they’re going to write it. 

 

Most of my big successes were in Santa Barbara, but nothing ever led to further work. A  few years after I moved away, I was visiting in Santa Barbara and attended a party and one of the other guests said hello to me and after a memory search I realized I’d written a brochure for her.  She said the brochure had been very successful for her; it promoted her seminar on passing the bar exam. 

 

She said that she had been very scared of me on the day we met because the agency owner and the account representative had warned her over and over about what a terrible guy I am and she should grit her teeth and put up with it because I did good work. 

 

And then when we met she slowly relaxed and then became very absorbed in talking about her seminar and had a completely opposite reaction to what the agency guys had warned her of. None of the other adbiz people had shown any interest in the stuff that she was trying to publish. 

 

I only met her that one time and wrote the brochure and moved on. The agency guys, my *pals*  (I thought) never mentioned that client again and let me believe it was a failure. 

 

So it was a revelation to find out ten years later that it was an active conspiracy against me! I asked around and sure enough I discovered that those guys bad-mouthed me to everybody who would listen. 

 

Anyway, that’s the kind of black hole I fall into.  I’m already a darkly self-critical introvert and the repeat work apparently goes to the empty-boasting extroverts.  

 

And it’s all just because I’m intoxicated by words. 

 

 

 

On Nov 7, 2014, at 10:11 AM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

When I sit down and turn on my computer, I expect knowledge, enlightenment, joy, fun, etc.  It is hard to muster the desire for any of those from the depths of a black hole.  It has receded into the background, for now. 

 

 You call yourself a “darkly self-critical introvert;” perhaps that’s coming through to your prospects.  No one wants to hire a person who has no confidence in his inner self.  The prospect might not even be able to articulate this perception of your self-criticism.  Just sayin’…  All those “empty-boasting extroverts” might have some kernels of truth in those boasts.  And–the people you perceive as extroverts might be introverts who have screwed their courage to the sticking point and stepped up to the plate in spite of their introversion. 

 

That can happen–it explains how I was able to address a statewide gathering of supervisors and brass (150 people) and tell them how I, a leadworker, thought we should be doing certain aspects of training.  They bought it, too, and when I got to my room, I thought I was going to throw up from the sheer stress of it all.  Public speaking is NOT my forte.  I was able to do it a couple more times while I was on the training task force, but never by my choice and never since.  If I had not been passionate about my subject, I don’t think I would have been able to do it at all. 

 

I have been perusing multiple catalogs for Christmas gifts, and one of the catalogs is called “Computer Gear and More” (I would have called it “Geek Gear”) and I saw a t-shirt that proclaims:  MAC users swear by their MAC; PC users swear at their PC.  Without your input on MACs, I wouldn’t have gotten the joke.  I didn’t find any suitable gifts in that catalog, but some of the items were so clever that I’m going to toss it in Jim’s gift box–he’ll get a kick out of it.

 

I went to Pet Smart armed with food recommendations published in “Whole Dog Journal,” a holistic publication.  I wound up buying venison-based and chicken-based moist food and 4 pounds of grain-free dry food, both from Nature’s Variety Instinct line.  I had bought just 1 can of food on my first trip to make sure Jesse would eat it. So far, so good.  I weigh Jesse once a week on a postal scale I bought specifically for that purpose, so as long as his weight doesn’t change, all is good.

 

My foot continues to improve slowly–I’ll see if I can keep it from taking me into another black hole…

 

 

On Nov 12, 2014, at 6:24 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I meant I’m darkly self-critical of my work. It could always be better.  The extroverts are happy with whatever they come up with first. 

 

Perhaps my mind has been poisoned by the constant barrage of sociopathic extroverts I’ve had to contend with in the ad biz. Perhaps their extroversion was a sham. 

 

The thing I learned from bumping into the seminar-brochure lady was that she said she was taken aback by how different I was than she’d been led to believe, and that made her re-assess her relationship with the ad agency: if they were so wrong about this, what else were they wrong about? And she learned a few things about the agency and stopped dealing with them.  

 

A few years after I wrote that brochure I had severe schadenfreude about that agency. There was a heated local election issue in Santa Barbara, a zoning variance to allow the construction of a big new hotel by the beach. It had high public interest because the developer was Hollywood star Fess Parker. 

 

As the election neared, Fess Parker hired the ad agency to create the advertising campaign–and that aroused a huge turmoil. The hotel project had a lot of support, but local big wheel after local big wheel went public with statements that if Parker hired that ad agency, they were withdrawing their support. After a week of media gushing about it, Fess Parker fired the agency and made a statement repudiating them. The agency kept their original $25,000 retainer. 

 

So, it wasn’t just Colin’s introverted paranoia conjuring things, it was out in public for all to see. I should have printed up some I TOLD YOU SO buttons. 

 

What’s coming through to my recent “prospects” is that they do not want copywriting done.  I’ve been aiming my efforts at contacting Web design shops, the way I formerly contacted graphic design shops in the print era. Today, a Web design shop calls me in because the text supplied by the client is rilly bad. But the client doesn’t care, and the design shop doesn’t tell the client that copywriters charge fees. Bad feelings ensue. Who called this writer guy into the picture, anyway? 

 

Back in the print days, salesmen knew to build the writing into the budget, the same way that Bill Schumacher built the installation costs into his kitchen remodeling estimates. People would gladly pay $900 for a cabinet if the labor price was $200, but would reject the deal if it was $500 for the cabinet and $500 for the labor. So the list prices on the sales sheet were about ten times higher than the going rate, but labor was virtually free. 

 

Today my own black hole brightened a little. The sleep doctor has grudgingly agreed to the payment terms so I have an actual project to work on. Maybe I’ll be able to afford to visit my brother in Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving. 

 

I got a promising call from a headhunter today, Creative Circle. They send out emails regarding Web projects but mostly they’re for highly credentialed management positions, or require technical proficiency in software that I don’t know. I’ve responded to a hundred of their emails a year without ever getting an interview or the slightest response. 

 

Today, however, the project was for “a copywriter for science-based technical copy. The ideal candidate will have knowledge and / or experience writing very technical, scientific processes. If you feel you are qualified for this position please send your resume and samples.”

 

How can you determine if you’re qualified? I’m good in some areas of science, not so good in others. 

 

In my reply I pointed to a couple of sciency things I’ve done, and within a few minutes after sending the email, my phone rang and it was a woman from the headhunter shop. They’re having a hard time placing this job, I guess. What kind of science is it? I  asked. “Engineering,” she told me.

 

I used to get a lot of work through placement agencies, but everything halted in the 2008 financial crash, and I’ve never gotten another lick of work through the ones I formerly dealt with. I go to their office at a new location and nobody I knew is with the company any more, and records of my 12 years with them have vanished. 

 

But. Today I got still another nibble: a vice president of some big Silicon Valley company wants to start posting articles to LinkedIn every two weeks about customer relationships post-sale. He’s a Harvard MBA with a PhD in economics from Oxford; he looked at a bunch of my stuff on my site. He would like some help in creating the posts to build a social media presence for himself. 

 

Who knows what the heck he wants. I’ll find out on the phone tomorrow. 

 

 

 

On Nov 16, 2014, at 6:28 PM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

I’ve been dealing with family things this past week.  One of them is my cousin Shara, who just had cataract surgery.  She told me that she had a black eye from the procedure, and that everyone who’d had that surgery wound up with a shiner.  (That’s very odd–I didn’t even have the ghost of a bruise when I had my two procedures.)  She called me last night to tell me she was on her way to Beaumont hospital because she was having flashes of light in her eye, a possible sign of retinal tear or detachment.  She did call me back today and said the doctors had found no retinal involvement, but told her to see a doctor immediately if the flashes got worse or she had other symptoms.

 

It has been very cold here–down to 7 degrees one night.  So far God has watched over this little house and no pipes have frozen.  I’ve had the cupboard doors under the kitchen sink open since the overnight low reached 20 for the first time.  Of course that means the garbage can, cleaning supplies, etc., are residing on the counter to keep Jesse safe.  Merry used to go in there and curl up when I had the doors open.

 

Most of my Christmas shopping is decided, and a good part of it is done.  I hate rushing around to do anything, so I am glad to have most of it finished.  I have no idea what to buy for teenagers, so gift cards are the order of the day for them.  My grandson Connor just got his driver’s license, so he’s pretty jazzed about that.  He was so easy to buy for when he was younger–he loved all things dragon.  One of his favorite gifts was a plaque that said “Do not mess with dragons, as you are crunchy and good with catsup.”

 

On Nov 20, 2014, at 9:04 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I worried about retinal detachment for a while…I woke up one morning four or five years ago and had an ocean of floaters in my right eye. Went to the hospital for tests and they found nothing amiss, but I subsequently had the flashes of light in the corner of my eye and a Web search said it was about 15% likely I had a detached retina. Subsequently it has not gotten any worse. 

 

Just normal California weather here. Finally got some rain–we’re in a three-year drought–but the days have been mild. I’m still bicycling every day in shorts and t-shirt. I don’t bike in the rain, though, or if it’s too cold or windy. On those days, I convert into my secret identity of Candy Ass Colin and use the car if I have to go somewhere. 

 

My revised Web site finally seems to be attracting work. My previous versions tried to present me as a graphics guy, a Web guy, and a copywriter.  The version I put up in September is all about copywriting, and suddenly I’m up to my ears in work. 

 

The apnea doctor finally sent a check. 

 

I’m in a rush job to complete a mini-brochure for a guy who’s going to make a presentation at a banking conference in New York on December 2. 

 

I wrote a min-biography for the CEO of a company that makes the surface coatings that convert a laptop monitor into a touch-screen, and it’s likely I’ll be writing a new version of their Website. 

 

And a company is making user manuals that have been translated from Japanese and the translations of technical stuff need to be further converted into sounding like normal English. 

 

Plus, a female basketball coach wants text for her personal branding Web site. 

 

So, maybe I’ve turned the corner. 

 

 

On Nov 24, 2014, at 10:46 AM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

I didn’t have any increase in floaters, but I had some weird jagged light flashes, mostly in my right eye.  I kind of ignored those for a couple of months, but then had a couple of very disconcerting events–one in the grocery store–that sent me to the eye doctor.  The “events” occurred when I was standing with a series of parallel lines to my right or left, i.e., grocery store shelves.  The shelves suddenly seemed to be moving up and down, rapidly enough to make me dizzy.  The eye doctor diagnosed silent migraines.  I guess I can be thankful they aren’t the noisy kind..…I can pretty much keep the damn shelves from moving by staying in the center of the aisle and turning to face them when I get ready to select a product.

 

I took a peep at your new web site–it’s very clear and appealing, and I’m glad to hear you’re getting more results from it.

 

The weather has turned more toward normal:  highs in the 30s and lows in the 20s.  We had the first snow of the season last Thursday.  It was only 1”, but it arrived at the beginning of rush hour on the heels of about 2 hours of freezing rain.  Nasty road conditions.  Spokane County law enforcement reported 40 collisions in about an hour and a half.  Mornings like that make me VERY glad I don’t have to fight rush-hour traffic every day. 

 

I do have to go out today or tomorrow to buy some more canned food for Jesse.  He is still enthusiastic about the chicken and venison, so this time I’ll buy a dozen cans or so.

I also have to buy another garbage can.  My trash day has been Monday for the last 20 years, and I take my can down to the roadside on Sunday nights.  Except that last night the wind was fierce, and I was afraid the can would blow over.  So, this morning, I forgot to take it down to be picked up.  The disposal company will pick up two cans next week for no extra charge, but I threw away the older garbage cans last summer. 

 

 

On Nov 30, 2014, at 6:54 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’ve had seven or eight episodes of migraine in the eye in the last 30 years. Usually it’s a glowing tetrahedral shape hovering in the lower right of my vision. Sometimes it’s just a brief attack, sometimes I close all the curtains and stay in bed for two days. 

 

A couple of jobs came in and I was crazy busy on Monday and Tuesday and then drove to Santa Barbara for Thanksgiving with Matt and Nancy.  I hadn’t been there since Christmas…in the past I visited Santa Barbara four or five times a year, and kept up with all the incremental changes, but now I observe a year’s worth of changes per visit. They had to put down one of their cats and the sole survivor  still seems anxious about it, according to Nancy, although I saw only the same affectionate black kitty as always. 

 

And their iguana died after growing from as long as your forearm to four feet long. The iguana lived in a 4′ x 8′  x 8′  glass cage that Matt built; he says he might convert the cage into a glass display case for his 1925 Harley Davidson.  One of the cylinder heads exploded and he can’t find a replacement. In a few more years he’ll be able to get a replacement from a 3D printing shop, maybe.

 

Matt has not shaved for a year and now has a gray ZZ Top beard.  His project of the month is rebuilding the straight six flathead engine of a 1959 Rambler for some collector. I’d never have thought that a ’59 Rambler would be valuable. 

 

Also had dinner with my old friend Henry from my days at Santa Barbara Magazine.  He and his wife lost their house in one of the wildfires that always seem to be hitting Santa Barbara, and their rebuilt showcase house high in the mountains is finally complete. They also have a house in downtown Santa Barbara that’s been a rental unit for years, and their big news is that they’re going to renovate the house in town and sell the mountain aerie and relax into retirement in town. Henry’s a photographer and now everybody with a cellphone camera is a photographer. The mountain house is a high-maintenace item and by selling it he’ll be able to pay off the house in town and live mortgage-free. 

 

On Dec 4, 2014, at 10:04 AM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

Being crazy busy is fun–as long as it doesn’t last for weeks or months without respite.  I 

used to love those days–made me feel competent and in charge. 

 

I swear there is a gremlin loose in my house.  First of all the remote for the DirecTV has stopped letting me schedule programs in advance.  It takes the request, but then doesn’t tune to the program.  Then the microwave started taking longer to cook things:  I use the same casserole to cook frozen corn, same size package, etc., and after the usual time there were still frozen areas.  It takes exactly 1-1/2 times as long as usual to do anything.  Then there’s the damn toilet.  It isn’t completely stopped up–yet–but it’s flushing so sluggishly that you have to urge it along with the plunger each time.  Sigh…

I don’t want to pay a plumber overtime, so I’ll wait until Monday morning to call.  Unless of course, everything comes to a screeching halt.  Then I’ll re-evaluate the situation.

 

Every time something about the house requires attention from a service person, living in town definitely has more appeal.  Then I remember that town living means NEIGHBORS, and I grit my teeth and call whoever I need to fix the problem.

 

I have never wanted an iguana as a pet, but people seem to love them.  My second cousin, Shara Marie, has 4 sons.  Several years ago, when the oldest was 6 and the youngest was 11 months, the two middle sons managed to release their iguana and climbed into the cage.  The iguana ran and hid (smart reptile.)  The boys then proceeded to play baseball and dress-up with iguana poop.  S

 

On Dec 6, 2014, at 2:27 PM, msrnmorley@aol.com wrote:

 

For a few minutes there I thought the Spangle Gremlin had gotten my keyboard, too.  It refused to put any words on the screen, so I shut down the computer and made sure the connections were tight, and apparently something worked.  I was in the middle of saying that Shara Marie was on the phone while the great iguana poop caper was happening. She said one or both of the boys had good throwing arms, as she had to clean poop off the ceiling. 

 

My brother has a ZZ Top beard, also gray.  He works around material-handling machinery, so it must not be considered a hazard.  Or maybe he braids it and tucks it in his shirt.  He did that at Mom’s funeral and I don’t think anybody realized he even had a beard.  

 

This is a wrap.

 

From: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
To: msrnmorley <msrnmorley@aol.com>
Cc: colin campbell <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Wed, Dec 10, 2014 8:11 pm
Subject: Re: mail interrupted

Matt and Nancy didn’t want an iguana. Their son Ian’s college girlfriend had an iguana. She asked Ian to take care of it while she flew back east for her grandmother’s funeral, and then she never returned. Matt and Nancy felt obligated to keep the creature alive. 

 

I never saw the slightest shred of human/reptile empathy on the iguana’s side. I don’t understand the attraction of having such a non-responsive animal as a pet. Here’s Ian a few years ago pointing out the direction of the sun for the stupid creature.

 

 

At least iguanas are vegetarians; a guy I know kept monitor lizards and had to buy live rats for them to eat. He had to wear work gloves to handle them because they were so prone to biting the hand that fed them. They weren’t really pets, they were affirmations of his lifestyle. He was an Oakland Raiders fan and this was his Halloween costume: 

 

 

On the other hand, some people have told me that they have a close relationship with their goldfish. They get home from work in the evening and stick their forefinger into the water and the fish rubs up against the finger just like a cat, they tell me. 

 

I can see how people get involved with birds that are verbally responsive but even ducks can learn to interact with you, as I discovered after I talked to a guy on the beach in Santa Barbara…I saw him all the time walking his ducks and I finally asked him if I could take his picture. He told me the ducks’ names were Windward and Leeward because one always walked on the beach side and the other on the ocean side. 

 

I’d thought he was some kind of bum but he turned out to be a retired Los Angeles parole officer.

 

 

On Dec 14, 2014, at 10:48 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I sat down to reply to your e-mail yesterday morning and discovered I had no internet connection.  I checked all the connections inside and concluded it must be the rain.  Wet weather often affects the phone here, so I assume it could get my internet as well.  Then today, I could not access my mail in the usual manner, but had to go through the aol sign-on.  Oh well, I got here.

 

I agree with you about having an iguana as a pet–what’s the point?  Nothing scaly can “cuddle,” and I never saw an iguana “hug” a person.  So you acquire this pet whom you must feed, shelter, and clean up after, and in return you get what?  A basilisk stare?  The uneasiness of friends?  I must say I admire Matt and Nancy’s resolve to keep the iguana alive.  I would have had the same impulse, but mine would have taken the route of sparing no expense to place the critter in a reptile sanctuary…..

 

As for the Raiders fan with the monitor lizards–that man has a death wish.  Monitor bites can be fatal even if you get immediate medical care.  And, if he were to fall and knock himself out or otherwise incapacitate himself while his beloved monitors were loose, he would become the next item on their menu very quickly.  I only knew of one person who had monitors–she was a cousin of a friend.  Her ultimate goal was to obtain a Komodo dragon.  I was just as glad that she lived a few states away.

 

I can understand how people can interact with birds–I am just not one of them.  As far as I am concerned, if you have birds in the house they should either be in a cage or in the oven.  This attitude does not sit well with people who have parrots or cockatiels or budgies.  Birds are unpredictable, and the world is their toilet.  However, they may be more sensitive to people than I previously thought.  Several years ago, I agreed to feed Billy the budgie and Romeo and Juliet the finches and assorted fish while my friends went on vacation.  The cages were set up so that I didn’t have to take the birdies out (otherwise I would’ve said NO).  Every time I went in to feed everybody, Romeo & Juliet flew back and forth so frenetically I was afraid the little things were going to have heart attacks.  Billy retreated to the farthest corner of his cage and spread one wing to cover his entire little body.  Only the fish seemed glad to have fresh food and came to the surface of the aquarium to feed.  Maybe the birds sensed they weren’t my favorite pet….

 

I don’t know about goldfish, but I saw a program on tv about unusual animal relationships–there was a golden retriever who would go to the koi pond and wait for his friend to swim up and touch noses with him.  That was pretty amazing. 

 

 

On Dec 19, 2014, at 3:42 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I shared a house in Royal Oak with Mark Schumacher for a while, and his girlfriend was a competitive finch raiser.  Dozens and dozens of the birds in the house, and she’d pack up five of her best birds and zoom off to some bird show and I was lucky enough to be allowed to feed the other birds while she and Mark were away. 

 

Somebody gave Scott a mynah bird in Santa Barbara back in the 70s and I never knew birds could be so malicious. My first encounter was when I was fresh in town and sleeping on Scott’s couch, and there was a knock at the front door. I groggily got up and answered the door but nobody was there. Just when I was almost back to sleep, another knock at the door, another nobody there. 

 

It was the bird. I hadn’t been aware there was a bird in the house. The bird knew it could fool me. 

 

Michael was his name and if a dog came into the house Michael would whistle and say “Come here, boy, come on,” and when the puzzled dog got close enough, Michael would peck him hard in the nose. He enticed cats to get close enough so he could grab their tail and pull the tail into the cage. Eventually Scott “donated” the bird to the Santa Barbara Zoo, but the zoo had to take Michael off display because whenever an elementary school class was brought through the bird room, Michael would vigorously recite his entire repertoire of obscene language. 

 

When Tom Parshall stopped here for a visit 15 years ago, he had an African gray parrot with him. The parrot seemed to be the center of his life. 

 

Recent research shows that birdsong and human speech are controlled by similar structures in the brain. I’ve been reading about a new theory that language evolved after our vocal tracts had been developed by singing to attract mates. 

 

Matt and Nancy had a songfest at their house on the day after Thanksgiving, as usual. They perform in music festivals around California several times a year and at Thanksgiving their pals from that circle who happen to be in Santa Barbara gather for music to hone their acts outside of public view. I talked in the back yard for a while with my nephew Luke’s new girlfriend Kendall while the music was on. I asked if she played an instrument: nope, she’s totally talented, she said.  I told her I was the least musical person in my family. They don’t allow me to sing. Nancy was the opposite: she became entranced by making music as a 4-year-old even though nobody in her family had any interest in music-making. That was part of the reason Nancy got involved with Matt: she liked the idea of a musical family. 

 

Meanwhile, here I am becalmed in the horse latitudes of the holiday season. All my projects are pending or on hold and I don’t know where my February rent is going to come from. I wrote a brochure/Web text for a pulmonary physician and I was on tenterhooks wondering what the response was, I heard nothing from the agency, and finally they forwarded an email from the doctor praising my text with only a couple of minor typographical changes, yay. But I don’t get the second half of my pay until the agency publishes the site, or rather when the doctor signs off on the final text of the site. 

 

Everything is up in the air. Last month I wrote a brief bio for the CEO of a company that makes silver nanowire transparent conductive coatings, and he liked it, a different agency tells me, and now he wants me to re-write his resume. I don’t understand what a CEO needs a resume for. Do companies that are looking for a new CEO start by looking at resumes? One of the claims in his bio is that he secured $12 million in funding in November, but now he’s looking for a job somewhere else? 

 

Oh well, I chose to be a freelancer.  I probably could have been the head of the department at Sears by now if I’d stayed there.  

 

 

On Dec 29, 2014, at 6:44 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Well.  The old Gateway rides again while the newer Dell sits to the side in disgrace.  This all started with a message that my PC was not able to open properly, and there were 2 choices:  I could either run a program to restore all the original settings, or I could run a program to erase the hard drive in its entirety.  So I chose numero uno, and the first message was that this would take several hours.  So I went about my business until it was finished, checking once in a while and getting encouraging messages like “diagnosing your pc”, “preparing automatic repair”, etc.  The final message was “resetting your pc, Microsoft security code 3177995”.  Then I sat down to sign on, and the damn machine kept asking for my Microsoft password.  One little problem–I had never input a Microsoft pw on that machine.  I pulled out all my notes and tried the password from this computer to no avail.

 

I have a suspicion that the Dell was a refurbished unit, and perhaps the password was put in by the original user and was reactivated by the automatic program.  Who knows?  At least this one is working.  When I sent it to CenturyLink for repair, someone thought I wasn’t using it to its full capacity.  I had 3 icons on the desktop when I sent it in.  I now have 15.

 

I remember Scott’s mynah bird, but of course I remember different talents than the ones you mentioned.  I did not remember that his name was Michael, but I do recall that he could imitate the sound of the toilet flushing to perfection.  He could also imitate a police siren, right down to the Doppler effect.  He occasionally freaked people out with that one.

 

You raise a good point about CEOs–how would you go about hiring a new one?  Maybe that’s where the clubs come in–country clubs, tennis clubs, golf clubs.  Maybe they just let their cronies know that ABC company needs a new CEO, and the process starts there.  That’s how the glass ceiling was first constructed, maybe….

 

 

On Jan 3, 2015, at 8:52 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

As a computer geek, I’ve always done my own repairs. It’s hard for me to imagine being without a computer…if one of my machines conks out, I have several other fully operational computers to fall back on. During power outages I use my laptop parsimoniously to nurse the battery along until power is restored. I do a lot of writing with pen on paper during outages.

 

I don’t know what I would do without the Internet today. My life is so intertwined with it. It masks my incipient Alzheimers–if I can’t think of a word, the Web will do it for me!

           

I had a similar password glitch with my cable provider,  Comcast. I’m unable to pay my bill online because I don’t know my mother’s maiden name. Or at least whatever name they have recorded for my account–they never asked me. I can’t change the password because first I have to enter the password. I went to their local brick & mortar office to straighten it out, only to discover that the office has no power to handle those kind of transactions, it has to be done online. So I’m writing a check and snailmailing it each month. 

 

I drove to Santa Barbara on Christmas Eve to spend the holiday at Matt & Nancy’s house. Besides the usual family and friends, there was a visitor I didn’t know, a dark-haired woman in her early 30s. She seemed eerily familiar but I couldn’t place her. “You don’t recognize me, do you,” she said. 

 

She turned out to be the daughter of Sarah, sister of the guy who murdered his father and grandmother. When I took a vacation from BBDO Detroit I went to Santa Barbara, Sarah and I had an evening together in the cabin in the mountains and after that we had a hot correspondence; when BBDO lost the Dodge account in 1979, I headed back to Santa Barbara with the idea of marrying her. 

 

It was a bizarre cross-country drive…I broke my right ring finger in a softball game, but my car was packed and ready for the drive so I took off anyway. I stopped in Ann Arbor to say hi to Mark and Jill, and they persuaded me to go to the hospital for xrays and treatment. Mark gave me a horse capsule of MDMA, known today as Ecstasy, and I used small portions of it to stay awake to drive all night. I drove through thunderstorms and saw ball lightning and, between storms, saw Skylab pass overhead every 90 minutes as the world awaited it to crash to Earth, and with my brain gyrating with grandiosity I arrived in Provo, Utah, to stop to visit my sister Mary, and as luck would have it, I arrived at her driveway just as she was opening the mailbox by the road. And in the mail was a letter for me from Sarah. Summarized, it said: “Cool it.”

 

She was now engaged to a high school dropout with an IQ of 180 who had a $250,000-a-year contract (in 1979 dollars!) with Burroughs Corporation to program chips in the FORTH computer language. They got married and two years later had a baby girl, Alana, and a few years later they moved away from Santa Barbara when the baby was 5. 

 

Now Alana is back in town to take over the cushy rent situation her late aunt enjoyed. I hadn’t seen her in more than 25 years. It was spooky how much she seemed like a clone of her mother in her gestures and speech patterns. 

 

We were talking about the old days and she said she liked a photo of herself at the cabin on Paradise road in the mountains when she was two years old: sitting in the lap of her grandmother who was wearing a Groucho glasses-and-mustache disguise, while on either side of her on the couch were three men with glasses and mustaches. One of them was her father.

 

Somebody e-mailed her that picture and she wondered if I’d ever seen it. Well, that’s one of my photos, I said. The version that people are emailing is an old low-res thing, and I told her I’d send her a high-res scan. She says she wants to make a print of it to put on the wall. 

 

http://colin.org/Photos/2014Photos/Holidays2014/Alana/groucho-glasses-couch002.html

 

Her mother, Sarah, is a psychotic wreck these days, according to everybody. Alana has an icy remote relationship with her. Sarah became a doctor but has lost her medical license after too many instances of substance abuse. I haven’t heard anything about her life because she’s been estranged from her family for decades. The family says it seems as though her latest husband knows how to handle her during her episodes. 

 

I guess it just underlines the idea that you have to be crazy to go out with Colin.

 

She sent me this Christmas card before we started our affair: 

http://colin.org/Photos/Earlier/1970s/1977/Sarah/Sara1.html  (Click on the card to open it.)

 

Anyway, I spent Christmas mired in the past. 

 

 

On Jan 8, 2015, at 11:26 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

As I think I mentioned before, I learned geek stuff only as I needed it, and I was never in the position to learn a great deal about the hardware.  I spent Christmas with Lance and Kelly and their 2 daughters.  Their son is in Virginia training to be a Secret Service agent.  He’s due to have a break in February, so I hope to get to see him then.  Their kids are more like grandkids to me than my own, and they treat me like a grandparent.

 

I am more dependent on the computer than I used to be–all my banking and bill paying is done online.  I check my balances every day or two, and that’s my main concern when I have no access to the internet.  I resort to the excruciatingly slow telephone banking system.  Once before banking was accessible online, I did my usual check on Friday night with the automated phone system.  It was the Friday before a Monday holiday.  I was expecting my credit card balance to be under $100, and it was $2700.00!  Yikes!  I had to wait until Tuesday morning to find out that a whole set of credit union cards had been hacked and used in Portugal, of all places.  They were removing all the charges and issuing new cards.  All their customers had to do was sign an affidavit that we had not been in Portugal during that time. 

 

I also would never stay in touch with the people I e-mail if I had to phone them–I’ve never been chatty Kathy on the phone.  Phones are useful for collecting money…

 

I cannot find the last few e-mails I sent–they must be loose in the ether, sailing around and dropping vowels and consonants indiscriminately over the landscape.  I don’t think I told you that I gave myself a new car for Christmas.  Everyone thinks this was an impulsive decision, but I had been thinking about it for months.  When I bought the 2012 Kia, I wanted a yellow one, but Souls were not available in yellow that year.  I began to feel that I had “settled” when I bought a silver one.  When I discovered a yellow 2014 Soul at the Kia dealership, I went over to see just what kind of deal they would make for my car.  I was pleasantly surprised, and now I have my yellow Kia, named Sassafras T, Sassy for short.  

 

The same girl who loaned me the last three Harry Potter books loaned me 3 books by Orson Scott Card, the first one being “Ender’s Game.”  I’ve read about 70 pages, and I fear it’s going to be another bottomless pit until I have read all three of them.  It’s very interesting, and quite readable.  Those two qualities don’t always go together.  

 

I also read another of the “Rogue Warrior” books, by Richard Marcinko and Jim Felice, and I read “American Sniper” by Chris Kyle and Jim Felice.  Since Felice is the common denominator here, I am ascribing the lousy writing to him.  The subject matter of both books is of great interest to me, but the writing obscured rather than illuminated the topics. Onward and upward, and back to Ender’s Game…. 

 

 

On Jan 12, 2015, at 7:43 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Merry Kia! Happy New Car!  

 

The only time I’ve ever shopped for a car was when I bought my current Saab. I wanted a black stick-shift turbo. Not new, I couldn’t afford a new car, but I had $12,000 on hand and I found a darned good machine on-line. 

 

The amusing thing to me was how everybody around me gave me advice on how to buy the car they would want.  For instance, I detest convertibles but people kept emailing me when they spotted a convertible I should get, because they liked convertibles and therefore everybody must like convertibles. 

 

I see that the Kia Soul is a hatchback. I like my Saab because it’s a hatchback with a design that looks like a car for a swingin’ bachelor, but actually is a practical station wagon.

 

I hardly use my car these days. I bicycle everywhere locally. When I started working at Wal-Mart.com it was a grueling 90-mile round trip each day, but after a few months they allowed me to work from home so I was able to commute electronically for several years. 

 

I haven’t had any card hacking problems yet, but twice the Bank of America has shut down my card as a result of mass hacking attacks. Both times they did not inform me of it until after the store clerk told me, “Your card has been declined.”  Grrr…

 

ENDERS GAME has always had a big reputation but I have never been a fan of Orson Scott Card, and I don’t even remember why, now. The story was originally a novelette in ANALOG in 1977 and  I barely noticed it at the time. I don’t believe I read the book version when it came out in 1985–I was done with science fiction by then. Done with fiction, actually. According to my book list, I read 57 books in 1986 and only one of them was fiction, THE SATYRICON by Petronius Arbiter,  a roman a clef about life under the emperor Nero, published around 66 AD. It has been a wellspring for stories ever since…F. Scott Fitzgerald’s working title for THE GREAT GATSBY was TRIMALCHIO IN WEST EGG; a long section of THE SATYRICON is a description of a stupefyingly opulent party thrown by Trimalchio, a rich Roman. 

 

Right now I’m reading VOYAGING IN STRANGE SEAS: The Great Revolution in Science, by David Knight. His thesis is that exploration in sailing ships was what fueled the onset of scientific thinking–before the discovery of the Americas, it was conceded that there was nothing new to be discovered, so why bother trying? The book covers the era from Columbus’s journey up to the French revolution, after which it was steam engines and mass production that drove advancement, not sailing ships.  Governments invested in astronomy, for instance, because it was utterly necessary for ocean navigation. 

 

The thing that’s jumping out at me is the lifespans of the various thinkers and adventurers…whenever the author mentions a person, he gives their birth year/death year. Christiaan Huygens discovered Saturn’s rings and applied the theory of pendulums to clocks, and he died aged 64. Cyrano de Bergerac lived to be 34 years old.  Just to open a page at random. 90% of the people listed in the book were dead before they got to my age. 

 

Meanwhile my career is still not dead yet, although sometimes it’s hard to tell. I’m having a hard time figuring out what the creative process is for the new agencies I’m dealing with. A pulmonary physician wanted text for a brochure and a Web site about his apnea and COPD practice. I wrote a rough draft of all the information I thought was important and gave it to the agency with the intention of discussing it and deciding which stuff was important and which stuff could be de-emphasized, with an edited version going into the little print brochure and all the stuff going into the spacious Web version. 

 

Instead they didn’t say a word to me, didn’t discuss anything, just poured the entirety of my text into one 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper in 6-point type. The doctor liked it, but will his elderly patients?

 

 


On Jan 15, 2015, at 3:50 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

The agency finally gave me a copy of the brochure I wrote:

 

On Jan 18, 2015, at 1:08 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I saw the copy of the brochure, but the print is so small I can’t read the copy.

 

I had to stop driving manual transmission cars back in 1985, when one of the chemotherapy drugs damaged my right shoulder.  I could no longer operate the stick shift without pain, so I had to trade in my little Pontiac T-1000 (think Chevette) on a 4-cylinder Pontiac with automatic, aka the gutless wonder.  Just as soon as my treatments were over I traded for a 1984 GMC yellow short bed pickup.  It had lovely, if impractical, fat fenders, and a 302 8-cylinder.  From the ages of people who admired the flashy truck, I assumed that I was exhibiting the taste of a 15-year old boy.  Didn’t care–loved that truck.

 

A gentleman around my age approached me in the grocery store parking lot to say how much he admired my car.  Must be the yellow–no one ever came up & said they liked the silver one!

 

I finished the 3 Orson Scott Card  books my friend loaned to me:  Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow and Ender in Exile.  I enjoyed the first 2 more than the third.  It was a 2-book premise.  I also read The Cold 
Dish, by Craig Johnson, which is the first novel in the Longmire mystery series, which is now a series on A&E.  I’ve seen maybe 4 or 5 of the Longmire shows, just enough to put faces to the names in the book.  

 

Our weather has been wet, cold, icy, foggy for the last two weeks and, as you might imagine, my joints have been very painful.  I used to think “under the weather” was a stupid saying, but that’s what it feels like–a weight pushing down everywhere.  And the ankle that was operated on in September reacts VERY badly to cold.  I have single-handedly revived a 70s fashion statement–leg warmers!

 

You know, I enjoy a good football game as well as the next person, but I think the Seahawks “12th Man” is absolutely ridiculous.  Why on earth would any group of fans want to be known for their collective big mouth??  They’re playing to determine whether they or the Green Bay Packers play in the Super Bowl, and I hope they win. But I still think being known for screaming one’s fool head off is asinine.  Well, well, I’m getting a little grumpy here, so best I sign off and curl up with my new JD Robb mystery.  I think I’ll turn the game on and mute the sound….Onward & upward…

 

On Jan 23, 2015, at 12:30 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

My left knee occasionally gives a shriek that the weather is going to change, the knee I wrecked in softball in 1971. People have always said that broken bones come back to haunt you in old age, but so far my 23 career broken bones have remained silent.  My sibs are plagued with arthritic joints even though they are all younger than me. I don’t know if it’s the luck of the genetic draw, or if my lifetime of constant athletic activity has forestalled it. 

 

I got a call from my doctor: The test results show a complete blockage of the coronary artery and a quadruple bypass is scheduled.   

  

For HIM, not for me. Whew. I run the Web site for his clinic; he wanted me to put up a banner on the site that the clinic

will be closed for two months while he recovers from the surgery.  

 

I remember that you bought a yellow Fiat in 1972 but I didn’t recall that yellow was the dominant factor. 

 

 

 

On Jan 27, 2015, at 8:05 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I would bet your painless once-broken bones are due to a combination of genetics and the benefits of daily exercise.  My ankle has been much better for the last few days as we are having a heat wave!!  The high yesterday was 55 (!)….shades of March.  Cooler temps return this week, but it was kind of nice to have a couple of warm days.  

 

You remember I told you about the Spangle gremlin that had gotten into the TV and microwave?  Well, it disappeared from those two appliances only to affect my floor lamp that I use for reading.  It had a sealed LED triple light, and it started blinking off for 3-4 seconds, then on for the same amount of time!? I even tried plugging it into a different outlet with the same result.  Amazon to the rescue!  I now have a triple fixture pole light fitted with spiral 60W equivalent fluorescents.  Take that, gremlin!  hahahaha

 

Doesn’t it seem odd that a doctor would close down his whole practice while he recuperates?

 

Yellow was not the deciding factor when I bought the Fiat.  But back in Michigan, driving a mid-60s vintage BEIGE Chrysler product, I realized when I started looking for a new car that I really missed having a yellow one.  Hence my preference for yellow vehicles

 

On Jan 29, 2015, at 8:19 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I have my doubts that the doctor will recuperate enough to resume his practice. He’s been getting vague and distracted for a few years and I suspect there’s arterial blockage in his brain, too. 

 

But what do I know. His practice has been dwindling. Last year the other physician abruptly quit the clinic and he never did tell me what happened, he just wanted me to remove her name and pictures from the site. He muttered about somebody trying to take over his clinic. He’s planning to retire to Traverse City and live on his investments. His girlfriend lives in France and because of visa problems she can only spend six months of the year here. Perhaps he will now live six months of the year in France. 

 

Running a seven-day-a-week walk-in clinic turned out to be more than one doctor could handle, go figure, and he’s been steadily reducing the number of days/hours the clinic is open. He hasn’t been able to recruit another doctor. http://saratogawic.com

 

I got my first Saab when a guy brought his non-operational Saab to my brother Matt’s auto repair shop in Santa Barbara. How much to fix it? $3,000, Matt said. The guy blustered a while and then said, how much would you give me for the car? and Matt said $300. And the guy took it. Matt and I spent a couple months rebuilding the engine and making it a hot rod, and then I gave him $3,000 for it. 

 

I drove that Saab to Detroit in 1993 to see if I could peddle my Macintosh wizardry to the Detroit ad biz. The short answer: no. The Detroit ad biz was scared stiff of the new technology. The ad agency where Scott was working set up an internal Macintosh unit for typesetting, but it was such a huge in-house bureaucratic process to get anything done, the art directors reverted to buying type from external vendors. 

 

And then my Saab blew its head gasket, and it turned out that no repair shop could figure out what to do. My cousin Chet Campbell is National Fleet Service Manager for General Motors, and with his help I discovered that the only competent Saab mechanic in the area was in Ann Arbor. And that my Saab had a negative value in Detroit–I would have to pay to have it towed away. 

 

Then somebody’s grandfather died and left behind a 1983 Oldsmobile Delta 88, and I gave them $2,000 and drove it for seven years. I was proud to see my car listed in the Most Stolen in the Barrio lists because it is a universal donor for big-frame GM cars of that era. Plus, it is accredited to have the most survivability after gunfire attacks–the car itself, I mean, not the occupants. The 88 can take slugs and keep running. 

 

I always wondered if it was true you could shoot out an engine, so Matt and I tried it a few years ago and took a cylinder head up into the mountains and blasted at it with .357’s. 

 

 

Then I bought my present Saab in 2000. I like it because it is virtually indistinguishable from a brand new Saab. 

 

 

On Feb 3, 2015, at 1:46 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Saabs and Volvos seem to inspire great loyalty in their owners.  I seem to recall that Scott had one of those turtle back Volvos with the long shifter when he lived in Santa Barbara.  It was white, and it strained mightily to make it up the hills in SB.  My mother had a 1968 Oldsmobile Delta 88, and I loved driving that car–I always felt safe in it. 

 

I just finished reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown–interesting, but his style is a little pedantic for my taste.  That renders his books quite informational, but led me to put down the book and take a break more often than I usually do.  It took me 4 days (!) to read the book.  I’m going to the bookstore later this week and will see if I can pick up used copies of the Da Vinci Code and Deception Point.  If not, I’m sure Amazon will be glad to send them to me….

 

I had a minor fall ten days ago-picked up a moderately heavy box without realizing I was standing on the hem of my robe…duh.  I fell with most of my body weight on my right hand, which put a very painful spasm in my trapezius muscle.  I went to the doctor and got a prescription for Soma, a muscle relaxant I have taken before.  But it was probably ten years ago or more that I took it, and I do not recall it knocking me flat.  The dosage is 3 per day, which I have been interpreting as 8, 2 and 8.  I can either take the medicine, which is helping, or I can go somewhere.  I don’t dare drive with that in my system.

 

I successfully downloaded a free word-processing system from Amazon:  it’s called Apache Office, and the only thing I did wrong was to somehow get two icons for it on my desktop.  I went to Amazon because I thought if I had problems with the download it might be easier to get help.  

 

 


On Feb 5, 2015, at 8:00 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

My shallow barrel of memories doesn’t have a speck of info about what Scott was driving in Santa Barbara back then. I guess we must have gone there together a few times but I don’t remember a thing. 

 

Saab is a very safe car, a monocoque body–“Born From Jets,” their ads used to say. I don’t know why I care about safety…I’ve never had any kind of car accident. I just drive fast so I’ll be beyond the point where the accident was going to happen…I’ve averaged one or two speeding tickets per decade. 

 

I probably have an outstanding warrant in Mississippi–82 in a 65 zone. The fine was $112 and I mailed them a check–and two weeks later I got the check back and a note informing me that they do not accept out-of-state checks. So I said, come and get me, copper. They have not as yet accepted my challenge and it’s been a dozen years. 

 

I probably would have liked THE DA VINCI CODE long ago, but I have no interest today. I loved ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION, which delved deliciously into the innards of the Vatican’s basement, but Tom Robbins’ subsequent books dived into exquisitely curlicued prose about nothing much. 

 

ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE stuck with me a long time. I still use it as a reference, in fact, for the section about being stuck.  The narrator made his living by writing user manuals so I had an affinity. The narrator was stuck on the road with a motorcycle conked out because of a gas line blockage that he was unable to troubleshoot. He dismantles half the engine trying to trace the cause, and then, duh, looks in the gas tank and he’s out of gas.  He was stuck because he’d dismissed one aspect of the situation from consideration. It was impossible for him to have run out of gas. 

 

What a spooky read it was, kind of a companion piece to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, from the point of view of the person who had his previous personality eradicated via electroshock therapy, and the mystical quest for the definition of “quality.” 

 

In one section he talks about writing assembly manuals, and how when the writer goes to the factory to find out how to assemble the Weber barbecue, the foreman will take his most useless person off the production line to explain it to the writer. Because he needs his knowledgeable people to stay on the job and not fuck around with some stupid writer. This made me careful to verify what the client told me. Not take his word for it.

 

I got an email today from an art director I’ve been estranged from for decades, hadn’t heard from him in a dozen years:

 

Colin,
Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you teaching me the value of thorough research. Sometimes I sell the sizzle instead of the steak, but the research supports it. 
Thought you might like to know. 
Thanks.  Mark

 

He was Scott’s employee; when Scott accepted a job at a Detroit ad agency in 1977, he “sold” his graphic design business to the employee. The quotes because Mark never paid the agreed monies, as it turned out. One of my photographer pals took a pic of the day when Scott moved away from Santa Barbara: 

 

 

Mark turned out to be quite a predatory bird. He and I created a lot of highly successful stuff, the premiere adbiz creative team in Santa Barbara into the early 80s, but he had to persuade the universe that he was The Onlie Begetter, a giant whose work would be even greater if he were not burdened by the dwarfs who were actually doing all the work. 

 

Our disjuncture came about when the Stubbies surf shorts account solicited pitches from West Coast ad agencies. I studied the surf shorts market and created a proposal, on spec, but we didn’t win the account. 

 

But, a year later, Stubbies was dissatisfied with their new agency but instead of cattle-calling again, they remembered my proposal, out of all the other ones from the previous year. Mark called me and asked if I still had a copy of the proposal: yes, I did. Whew, because he’d thrown his copy away. 

 

The Stubbies guys came to Santa Barbara for an interview–I was amused to see that Mark filled up his office with five temps for one day to give the impression he was a lot bigger than a one-man band with a receptionist.  I spoke eloquently at lunch to the Stubbies guys and they awarded Mark the contract, the biggest contract he’d ever landed.  

 

And a couple days later Mark informed me that he’d decided I wasn’t the right writer for this job, and he severed connections with me. 

 

ANyhow. Sorry to hear about your fall. I’m immune to those kind of accidents because I’ve never worn a robe in my life. See, I knew they were dangerous! 

 

I know about landing with your weight on your hand. Five years ago some guy ran a stop sign in front of me and I slammed on the bicycle’s brakes–and was flipped over the handlebars and landed on my hands, spraining both wrists, and the impact traveled up my left arm and cracked a rib on my back under my shoulderblade. That’s my own diagnosis, I never sought treatment, just three days in bed trying not to breathe. 

 

What word processor are you replacing with Apache Office? I’ve been using Microsoft Word for, cripes, 28 years now. I’ve tried a bunch of others but they all want to be more! more! more!  Not just a measly word processor, but a page layout application to make your company newsletter, and a picture-manipulating application to fit pix into your newsletter, and a PDF generator and a fax device and an Internet connection and and and, but all I want is a typewriter on the screen. Microsoft Word is a huge terrible kludge, but at least by now I know how to turn off all the “features.”  

 

Nuke is still using CatsPaw 1.0

 

 

 

On Feb 14, 2015, at 7:54 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

This will be my third attempt to reply to your e-mail.  I won’t go into detail about my tussles with aol, but if I think I’m going to lose what I’ve written so far you may get incomplete chunks of mail.

 

I wasn’t replacing any word processing program–I just assumed the new computer would come with one, and it didn’t.  I just basically wanted a typewriter also, having had Microsoft Works on all my previous units.  I have not found a label application on the Apache Office yet–doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

 

Is “monocoque” the same as “unibody construction”?  I used to drive fast, and I was heavily into road rage before anybody even called it that.  I had an accident back in the early 80s, in my third and final ’67 Mustang.  There was no straight sheet metal, no glass, and 2 broken axles when I finished playing bumper pool with a few large trees.  I didn’t break anything but my skull and my pride, of course.  That did slow me down a bit, and now I use my cruise control religiously.  I also do not indulge my propensity for road rage anymore, though I will use my horn if someone does something egregious.

 

 Last week, I inadvertently scared someone, I think.  She ran a stop sign right in front of me–never even slowed down–and if I hadn’t been alert I would have hit her.  So I leaned on the horn for a few seconds (and believe me, the Kia horn is not designed to intimidate…)  It just so happened that I was going the same way she was, so I followed her down the hill–about a mile.  She turned north on the 4-lane, and so did I.  I set my cruise control and made no attempt to catch her.  The incident was over when I let up on the horn, as far as I was concerned.  When I took the exit for the grocery store, I was behind her again.  She took off like the wind, and instead of proceeding to the retail area, she dove onto the ramp taking her back the way she had come.  Oh well, maybe she’ll think about the next time she comes to a stop sign.

 

Our weather has been spring-like for the last 10 days–highs in the 50s and lows in the 40s.  That’s about 20 degrees higher than normal.  No one’s complaining, but I did stop at the vet and pick up Jesse’s flea and tick treatment.  Warm weather this early is likely to lead to early creepy-crawlies.

Speaking of Jesse:  he has been thrilled by the warm days, especially those with no wind. He goes shooting out the door and does laps on the patio before he picks a spot to leap onto the grass.  Yesterday, when I came home from the grocery store, he must have run a dozen laps from the front of the house into the garage and around the car, ears flapping and tail wagging.

 

When I still had KC, and came home with groceries, he would twine around my legs as I brought things in, secure in the knowledge that I would never step on him.  Tripped a few times…I sure do miss having a cat.  Here’s hoping aol will send this message in its entirety.

 

 

On Feb 17, 2015, at 1:35 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I don’t know a thing about AOL, except that us early Internet adopters always had scorn for AOL. “Assholes On Line” was what it stood for, back then, according to us elitists. I’ve owned my own domain for 20 years now and during the 90s and 00s when I was doing a lot of contract work on the clients’ premises, they always issued me an official company email address but I never used them and instead used a simple Telnet app to reach down into the bottom of the Windows OS and sidestep  protocols and connect to my own domain to access email. 

 

The only ones who noticed were the in-house IT crews, and they were always my pals because I sought them out and treated them like humans. Also, when there was a problem with a Macintosh somewhere in the company, the IT boys came to me for help because they only knew Windows. 

 

Word processing is one area where progress has gone in reverse. My first one was WordStar in 1982, and it had features that are no longer available on modern word processors even though the size of the whole program was only 32 K. I learned several others while doing contract jobs in-house for companies, and then got Microsoft Word in 1987 when I went to the Mac side. I forget now which version of Word it was, but I would gladly take it over the up-to-date version I’m using now, which uses 1,270 MB. The primary example of “bloatware.” 

 

The thing that pesters me these days is the auto-correct function. I have it mostly under control in Word, but I’m often writing at social media sites such as Facebook and news aggregators like Free Republic, where your typing is gently changed into what the consensus prefers. I don’t do much texting, but the changes imposed by smartlphones and iPads are widely circulated for their hilarity. 

 

Plus the changes machine-imposed for the sake of political correctness.  One article about the art efforts of grade-school children talked about the comparative usage of colors, researched by analysis of the lengths of used red, blue, yellow, and African-American crayons. 

 

I don’t remember anything about your driving except for your enthusiasm for punishing other drivers with the horn. I’m completely the opposite–I test-honk the horn every few years to make sure it’s still working. Mostly I ride my bicycle, which has no horn. 

 

Today I heard from the design agency that’s making the Web site for the apnea doctor. I submitted my rough draft the day before Thanksgiving and they published it as a brochure, but I don’t get the final half of my fee until the Web site goes live. It’s supposed to use the same text. Today the agency cc’d me with an email to the doctor saying sorry, they’ve been rilly busy, but now they’ve picked out a template to use and they might start actual work on the site any day now. 

 

This week I’m working on a brochure for a Retirement Plan Advisor, through a different design agency, operated by a couple of young guys of Iranian extraction who are functionally illiterate. They re-designed their own site last summer and on their home page was this example: 

 

I sent them an email pointing out the errors, and a few dozen others, but they didn’t respond until last month: the owner connected with me via LinkedIn.  A few days later I bicycled to his office in downtown Campbell and yakked about stuff, and he showed me a draft of a brochure for a retirement plan advisor. I didn’t say anything about the brochure but instead talked about my general principles of text construction. A couple days later he told me the retirement plan guy would like to talk to me, and I met him and got a check to get started. 

 

And that’s how the March rent got into the bank. I’m forever on the brink of catastrophe, as usual.  

 

And now I have to talk big about stuff I know nothing about, but make it believable. As usual.

 

What’s holding you back from getting a new cat? Are declawed cats a rarity at the shelters?  

 

Nuke is always helping me in my work: 

 

 

 

From: Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com>
To: colin <colin@colin.org>
Sent: Mon, Feb 23, 2015 1:02 pm
Subject: Re: mail interrupted

I have been fighting the Cold of the decade since Sunday, 2/15.  Apparently the rhinovirus making the rounds in Spokane County is worse than usual.  A male friend of mine actually missed work because he was so sick, and that has never happened in the 12 years I’ve known him and his wife. The salient feature of MY cold was the uncontrollable coughing–I have sore muscles in my chest and back from the coughing spells.  I finally tried some Xanax, and that calmed the coughing enough for me to sleep a few hours.  Today, finally, the cough is looser and not non-stop anymore, so I think I might live…

 

You’re still a California elitist:  You own a Saab.  You ride your bicycle most of the time.  You only read non-fiction.  You own your own domain.  The implication is that anyone who doesn’t do these things is just one of the great unwashed.  Of course, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.  I have my own set of elitist leanings.

 

I haven’t really looked for a cat yet.  I am what’s standing in the way of getting a cat.  On the one hand, I miss Merry a lot.  On the other hand, I have to go to great lengths to keep any cat off the upper half of my bed, otherwise I wake up with swollen, itchy eyes and congestion.  Merry absolutely refused to sleep on the foot of the bed, so I had to banish her completely at night.  If I didn’t, she would curl up around my head…..sigh, and sneeze.  She wound up sleeping in my recliner most nights, and I handled that by putting a throw over the chair at night and removing it in the morning.  I have to be ready to cope with all that.

 

Jesse does not provoke allergic reactions in me.  He sleeps at the end of my pillow to begin the night, but usually winds up stretched out along my back.  When I was having all the trouble with the coughing spells, he got off the bed and went to his little bed in the living room to sleep.  

 

I already have this picture of Nuke–I printed and posted it in my “OPP*” area on the side of my filing cabinet.  *other people’s pets.

 

 

On Feb 27, 2015, at 10:54 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Here’s what I said on Monday:

 

I have been fighting the cold of the decade since Sunday, 2/15.  Apparently the rhinovirus making the rounds in Spokane County is worse than usual.  A male friend of mine actually missed work because he was so sick, and that has never happened in the 12 years I’ve known him and his wife.  The salient feature of my cold was the uncontrollable coughing–I have sore muscles in my chest and back from the coughing spells.  I finally tried some Xanax, and that calmed the coughing enough for me to sleep a few uninterrupted hours.  Today, finally, the cough is looser and not non-stop anymore, so I think I might live.

 

I haven’t really looked for a cat yet.  I am what’s standing in the way of getting a cat.  On the one hand, I miss Merry a lot.  On the other hand, I have to go to great lengths to keep any cat off the upper half of my bed, otherwise I wake up with swollen, itchy eyes and congestion.  Merry absolutely refused to sleep on the foot of the bed, so I had to banish her completely at night.  If I didn’t, she would curl up around my head…sigh, and sneeze.  She wound up sleeping in my recliner most nights, and I handled that by putting a throw over the chair at night and removing it in the morning.  I have to be ready to cope with all that.

 

Jesse does not provoke allergic reactions.  He sleeps at the end of my pillow to begin the night, but usually winds up stretched out along my back.  When I was having all the coughing spells, he got off the bed and went to his little bed in the living room to sleep.

 

I already have this picture of Nuke–I printed and posted it in my “OPP”* area on the side of my filing cabinet. *other people’s pets.

 

After I wrote and sent that, my cough got worse, although still loose, and it became obvious that the infection had gone into my lungs.  So–I am feeling better, though not great.  If you don’t get this e-mail I’m going to introduce my computer to the joys of C-4……………

 


On Feb 27, 2015, at 5:50 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

This sounds like a broken record:  did you get my THIRD e-mail with the gist of the 2/23 missive?

 

 

On Feb 27, 2015, at 6:11 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

These danged broken records, might as well be living in GROUNDHOG DAY.

 

 

  On Feb 27, 2015, at 10:27 AM, colin campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

  No, I meant that I did get your re-send of 2/23 with the report of the Cold of the Decade–I meant 

  that the original must have gone forlornly into that dark night.

 

Of course, these days if you say “broken record” to a young person they think you’re talking about a sports event. 

 

Sounds like the congestion from your cold must have gotten into your computer lines.

 

I haven’t had a cold in a long time, who knows why.  Maybe my immune system is extra husky. Since the last time I saw you, I’ve probably had three colds. Partially it’s due to my lack of exposure…one of the benefits of the hermit’s life…but when I was with Linda, I never contracted any of the colds she invariably got every September when the school year began and the privileged kids in her advanced-placement classes brought back exotic viruses from their summer vacation travels. 

 

 

On Mar 1, 2015, at 10:56 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Well, I don’t know if I’m an elitist. I was using the term ironically about the hacker folks and originally I used the hacker spelling, 3L337, but then I realized that you probably haven’t been immersed in hacker slang, in which a “3” is an “E” and a “7” is a “T”.  ELEET.  So I edited it.

 

And I wake up unwashed every morning. As a domain owner, I’m a member of a dwindling and forgotten class. In 1999 my father was in town for a wedding and I showed him my Web site and I gushed about how the Web was going to take over the world and everybody would have their own Web domain, and he grumpily said, “What if I don’t WANT a domain?” 

 

And he turned out to be more right than me. Even among my long-time hacker pals, nobody owns a domain any more. If you want to participate in the Web it is much much easier to set up your own page on Facebook or WordPress or any of a zillion other freebie sites. 

 

I’m not an elitist about fiction/non-fiction. I was a mass consumer of fiction. I’ve been trying to write fiction all these years and now when I look at other people’s fiction all I see is the gears and wheels under the storyline. I get more personal pleasure out of reading non-fiction. 

 

Although I’m getting grumpy about that, too. There’s a weird trend toward inserting political correctness into the strangest corners…I’m reading a book about the history of gold and silver coinage, for instance, and the author stops every few pages to castigate the Romans for their environmentally unsound practices that led to global warming. 

 

 

It took me several years to get back in the saddle after my cat of 19 years died. I might be a tad allergic–I blow my nose about 20 times a day at home, but when I visit in Santa Barbara my nose doesn’t act that way. Or it could be just because of cat dander buildup from my rigid schedule of vacuuming the carpet twice a year. 

 

Nuke doesn’t sleep with me but he gives me a good-night hug every night.  Cuddles up and interferes with my view of the book I’m reading, and kneads my neck and purrs. Then after lights out he comes back for another such session, and then hops away to his night-time perch. 

 

In the mornings when he wants to play he fetches a green catnip mouse on a string and drops it under my typing chair. Most of the time I’m engrossed in my computer screens and I don’t notice the mouse until he says something, or wraps himself peskily around my ankles. He likes other toys better, but this is the one he can carry. 

 

Today I dangled the mouse string but he sat indifferent and stared toward a closet door. This is his signal that he wants to chase the laser light. He chased after it madly for a while and now he’s dozing in the sunlight from the balcony window. 

 

A nice sunny day here, but probably too chilly for Candy Ass Colin to go for a bike ride. Plus, I’ve got to stay home and work on the Retirement Advisor brochure. Also, I have a new project to write four pages of stuff for the San Francisco Horse Association to go into their application to the IRS for 501(c)3 non-profit status, so I have to study horsies. 

 

 

On Mar 1, 2015, at 5:56 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Oops, I sent this reply this morning but now I realize it was the same subject line as the one that AOL might have been choking on. So I deleted a few thousand of the previous messages and I’m resending it. 

 

Also: I was wondering if you recall anything of the time we had drinks with Philip K. Dick in a bar booth at the science fiction convention in 1972.

 

 

On Mar 2, 2015, at 8:11 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Nope, not familiar with hacker slang at all, but now I have a little piece of knowledge which I will undoubtedly use at some point…Your reply got through on the old line, but it may be the messages 

I’m trying to send that overload AOL, not the ones I receive.  Now that I think about it, a few of your messages have gone astray, so that blows that theory out of the water.

 

Onward and upward…When you mentioned having drinks with Philip K Dick, I had a vivid memory flash of sitting in a booth with my hair trailing across my bare arm, chin propped on hand, listening to the two of you talk.  That’s the entire memory.  I must have been wearing something sleeveless.

What do you remember?

 

I wonder if Jesse would play with a laser light?  He flatly refuses to retrieve ANYTHING, but occasionally he gets this wild look in his eye, retrieves a treat he’s stashed in his little red house and chases it mercilessly.  He throws it sideways, straight up, paws at it like a cat, then grabs it and does a couple of 360s with it in his mouth.  When he’s got the chasing out of his system, he settles down on the futon and eats the treat.

 

I keep getting a notification of “High CPU usage – Internet Explorer” and my AOL tool bar is flashing periodically, so I’m going to send this.  Don’t know what that message means–don’t want AO to lose this e-mail and piss me off again! 

 

 

On Mar 4, 2015, at 10:13 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I don’t remember much of anything about our meeting with Philip K. Dick, darn it. We were in the bar at the International Hotel and I don’t recall how we ended up in a booth with him. My conjectural memory is that he had his new young wife (younger than us) but she didn’t say a thing. I tried to talk about his books and stories, and the writing process, but he brushed all that kind of stuff aside. He went into a discussion of science and what if some new experiment discovers that the foundational substance of the universe is custard? 

 

He went on for a while with the ramifications of the custardization of the sevagram. It was all entertaining and funny and spur-of-the-moment. 

 

Perhaps it was the same day you were wearing your Hutt’s Hookers t-shirt. I remember that we shared an elevator with Harlan Ellison and, instead of being a cranky ogre, as fan legend had it, he was charming and friendly, especially toward your un-bra’d t-shirt. 

 

Here’s Mary in a Hutt’s Hookers shirt: 

 

 

I don’t know anything about Internet Explorer–it’s no longer available on the Macintosh. I use the Mac default browser, Safari, mainly because of its highly useful “reader view.” Click the “reader” icon and all the ads and distractions are flensed away, leaving only the text of the article

 

 

 

The mysteries of PC arcanology are outside my ken. This page gives advice on how to fight the “High CPU” warning: http://classroom.synonym.com/reduce-amount-cpu-usage-internet-explorer-8757.html

I saw several discussions that blame problems on not enough memory installed–I forget if I asked you how much memory you have in your computer. But I also forget which computer you’re using.

 

But, why are you using Internet Explorer? On the PC side, 62% of people use the Chrome browser, 23% use Firefox, and only 8% still use Explorer. Everybody hates Explorer. 

 

I use Chrome and Firefox for various specialized tasks, but Safari is my main browsing tool.  Chrome and Firefox are both free downloads–have you tried them? 

 

 

 

On Mar 10, 2015, at 6:52 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I’m having the same damn problem with aol not saving OR sending my e-mail.  I had the good sense to print what I had written this time.  Of course, it’s in 6-pt type…or maybe smaller.  I will retype it tomorrow when I get home from the dr/pharmacy visits.  I also intend to set up another e-mail account—Hotmail, yahoo, something.  Any input?

 

 

On Mar 10, 2015, at 7:09 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I have zero experience with email accounts because I roll my own with my domain. 

 

Nuke used to have an email address at colin.org so he could personally send thank-you notes to people who cat-sit for him, and I was going to have him send this note to you, but now I notice that I haven’t  updated his account after I changed ISPs a couple years ago, and I feel like re-learning how to do it right now. I can host up to 50 different email addresses (just like Hillary!) but I’ve only ever used me and Nuke. 

 

Anyway. Most of my hacker pals have their email accounts at yahoo.com.

 

 

On Mar 11, 2015, at 5:51 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

The e-mail I sent on 3/10 had more than the one line that’s showing with your reply of 3/10.  Whatever…the following is what I attempted to send when aol refused to save OR send:

 

I don’t remember anything about an elevator encounter with Harlan Ellison, nor about wearing a t-shirt that said Hutt’s Hookers.  As a matter of fact, that fleeting memory of our meeting with Philip K Dick is about all I DO remember about that convention.  

 

I use internet explorer because it’s there, working, and because I downloaded Chrome some time ago, and it affected most every other system on my computer–adversely.  It slowed some things down, made others jerky, made signing in a minutes-long process.  I couldn’t believe that Chrome was the problem, but as soon as I eradicated every trace of it from my computer all the problems went away.  I have no idea how much memory my computer has (the Gateway at this point.)  I used to memorize all that when I bought a new computer, but I have no idea how much this one or the previous 2 Dells have.  had.

 

I’m going to go to the hyperlink you included in your e-mail and print the information, as my Kodak printer and I seem to have a truce right now.

 

 




On Mar 13, 2015, at 12:56 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

In my Macintosh email application, if you highlight a line and then click “reply,” only the highlighted line will appear as the “original message,” instead of the whole history of the email sequence. Also, it was to signal that my reply was only about your “Any input?” question. 

 

 

 

My knowledgeable pals use yahoo.com.

 

The sci-fi convention was my thing, so it’s no wonder I have more memories. I talked to several big-time authors. We encountered A.E. Van Vogt in an elevator, but he had two Dobermans on leash and remained frostily aloof. I struck up a conversation with third-string writer Mack Reynolds and we ended up yakking in his room until 3am. In the 1960s he had a bunch of serials in ANALOG about a future in which the countries of Europe had become the single country of Common Europe with one currency for all of them to use. Obviously crap. 

 

We drank from his bottle of mescal, tequila with a worm in it, that was illegal in the US at that time. When we left his room I said he would not be able to show up for his scheduled appearance at a discussion panel the next morning because he was so completely drunk, but instead he was lucid and forceful at the panel. Colin was wrong again. 

 

I also remember another couple who tagged along with us during the convention, but the only thing I remember is that the guy was able to dislocate all his finger joints to show grotesquely splayed claw-hands. 

 

 

As for computer memory, I was conjecturing that your problems could be caused by insufficient RAM, which is pretty darned cheap these days. I have 16 GB of RAM in my Mac. If you have only 4 GB, that could be a factor. You could look on your invoice for the Gateway computer and maybe it will say how much RAM you have. I googled “Find out how much RAM your computer has” and found different instructions for each of Windows 7 and Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

 

But, I expect the problem is with Internet Explorer. Not that I have any experience with it, but everybody complains about it. 

When did you have problems with Chrome? It’s at Version 42 now.  I use Chrome to watch baseball games at mlb.com because Chrome gives me a much less stuttery video feed than Firefox or Safari. 

 

Plus, I have an in-house expert who is completely at ease with computers:

 

 

Meanwhile, I’m trying to get out of another siege of catatonia. I have projects on hand but I just sit here staring and doing nothing. I had a flurry of activity last week when the San Francisco Horsemen’s Association had an emergency need. They had only one week left until an IRS deadline to apply for 501(c)3 non-profit status and although they had filled out all the check-box items, they needed a written narrative explaining why they deserved this status. 

 

I said I needed 50% up front to start work; they scrambled to put together a bundle of information and overnighted it to me with a check on a Saturday. I spent the weekend studying their site.The package arrived on Monday morning and I studied their 1940 Articles of Incorporation and the 27 pages of their corporate by-laws and the Web sites of three other horse associations 

in California and the IRS Guide to Applying for 501(c)3 Non-Profit Status, and five examples of 501(c)3 forms completed by other outfits, and then called the horse association president and grilled her for an hour and a half about each of the 14 topics required to be written about, and wrote a first draft. I sent that to them and a few hours later I called the recently retired ex-president and grilled him about each of the 14 topics, and went over the first draft with him, and created a second draft for them by mid-day Tuesday. Racing against time because the fully completed application had to be in the IRS’s hands by Friday. 

 

On Wednesday they called me and thanked me for my help and said that because what I’d done was good, the job was finished,  and it looked so easy, they weren’t going to pay me the final half of my fee. 

 

Then I went to my mailbox and found another check from the Horsemen’s Association. It turned out that in their frantic fear on Saturday, two different people wrote half-in-advance checks to me. One was overnighted, and the other went into normal snailmail. So I got my full fee anyway. 

 

I guess it’s like hiring a call girl: the price that seemed okay on a hot Saturday night looks different than on a hangovery Sunday morning. 

I’m used to being spit on by my clients, but this was a new one: your stuff is so good that we’re not going to pay you. 

 

 

Catatonia is a refuge but it doesn’t pay the rent. 

 

In the old days I worked with adbiz professionals who understood that copywriting is a difficult process. In today’s modern Web world, though, the design agencies no longer offer copywriting to their clients. I’ve looked at the sites of hundreds of Web design shops in Silicon Valley, and only about one percent of them have a copywriter on their staff. Whatever text is required for a site will be supplied by the client. 

 

And, since words are free for the taking from the dictionary, they aren’t willing to pay for some pretentious re-arrangement of the free words. 

 

So I’m constantly working with people who have never purchased copywriting before–not the clients, and not the design agencies.  All they want is enough words to fill up the space. 

 

The Web shop that’s doing the site for the Apnea doctor is screeching at me to create more text. They want a price from me for the further text. Well, okay, what is the text supposed to be about? How much text? 

 

And in reply, Chi-Ping Li tells me, “Colin, you so hard to work with.” She TOLD me already that the topic is “Guides & Tips.” So, how much you charge? 

 

I asked her if I could get the final payment for the work I’ve already done on the Apnea brochure, and she has bitterly acquiesced. The check is in the mail. Now I must go to her client and find out what I’m supposed to be writing about, and submit a bid. The existing budget is: $0.00. 

 

Meanwhile, I went to the mailbox and found an unexpected check: I met with a guy in December who wanted help putting text into a site template he’d purchased from CPA Site Solutions (your site will look exactly like every other accounting professional’s site!) and after I wrote him back an email explaining what I’d discovered in my research about the template, I never heard a thing back from him until the day before yesterday, when he emailed me with an apology and asking me to bill him for the hour I spent with him, and today I got a check from him. 

 

On the down side, at the mailbox I encountered one of my neighbors, Laurie, who said, “Colin, did you know that your left front tire is flat?”  Well, now I know. 

 

 

 

On Mar 17, 2015, at 8:41 AM, Rhonda Morley <rhondamorley14@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

 This e-mail address is rhondamorley14@yahoo .com   There is no option to import my contacts from aol–only from socially “approved” sites…..Yahoo also REQUIRED a mobile phone number to set up an account, so I used my home phone…good luck texting to that one, yahoo elves!

 

 

 

On Mar 18, 2015, at 8:39 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

One good thing is that I no longer have to use a magnifying glass to read your messages. 

 

I don’t have any recent experience in changing email addresses–I’ve had the same address for 20 years–so I’m unable to offer any advice on your changeover. I’ve changed hosts and internet service providers many times, but I’ve always dragged my own domain along with me.

 

Before that, my email address changed all the time because of industry consolidation–I started with some small local email provider, and then I got a message that they’d been bought out and my address was now colin@crl.com,  and then a few months later crl got bought out by a larger outfit and I had a new suffix to my email address, and that happened two or three more times before I bought my own domain. 

 

But, that never had any impact on my emails: the companies took care of re-routing messages. So I didn’t have to contact people to inform them, except for when I started my domain. 

 

 

On Mar 23, 2015, at 12:02 PM, Rhonda Morley <rhondamorley14@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

Setting up a new e-mail address was really simple, but apparently the Yahoo elves can’t spell “reply” or they hid it in some really clever place.  I finally recognized the arrow sort of icon that denotes reply……sigh.  The world is ruffling my feathers lately.  

 

I had to drive out to the Kia dealership to pick up the second key fob for my car–they had misplaced it.  That’s a 70-mile round trip, much of it on I-90.  It must have been the day for the insane peoples’ outings, and they were all on the freeway with me!!  I was very glad to get home that day in one piece.  Give me a Detroit expressway at rush hour anytime–people here don’t know how to drive on freeways.

 

But I did discover something nice today on Amazon:  there is a free Kindle reader–all you have to do is download it.  I gritted my teeth and did so, and it worked!  There is now an icon on my desktop which gives me access to thousands of free titles, plus any of the Kindle titles for sale through Amazon. Yay!!  That calmed my feathers considerably.  

 

 

On Mar 24, 2015, at 3:24 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’ve had the Kindle reader for five or six years, but I haven’t used it much lately. It seems to be good for fiction but I flamed out on it trying to read ANTIFRAGILE on it. 

 

ANTIFRAGILE: Things That Gain From Disorder, is by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who had a runaway bestseller five years ago that I liked a lot, THE BLACK SWAN: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

 

Reading the Kindle version of ANTIFRAGILE, I could barely make head or tail of it, and one reason was that it is full of neologisms and I couldn’t keep track of them; Taleb put a glossary at the end for all the coined words, but I discovered that I could not easily flip back and forth between the glossary and the page I was on. So I bought the hardcover version and could easily flip back and forth, but I still didn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about.

 

 

Sorry I can’t help with the idiosyncrasies of Yahoo mail. I’ve never had to deal with anything but  my Macintosh mail app. 

 

And even Apple is getting murky…the “Reader” button in Safari formerly was a button with the word “Reader” in it, until the latest version of Safari came out, and now the button in the menubar is this: 

 

It’s been six months now and I still can’t find it on the page in an automatic way, I have to stop and consciously think about it to find it. “Oh, yeah, three and a half horizontal lines, that means “Reader.””

 

 

On Mar 27, 2015, at 1:41 PM, Rhonda Morley <rhondamorley14@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

I have decided to regard my “sent” folder and reality as two ships that pass in the night and sometimes exchange passengers.  30

 

One of the reasons I have not bought a Kindle is that I thought it would be difficult to page backwards and refresh my memory as to character names.  Pesky little brain damage…I haven’t actually tried reading anything on my Kindle app yet.  I think I’ll switch monitors before I do.  This is a 13 or 14 inch flat monitor, but I have a 19″ sitting out in the garage.  In my prior configuration I thought it would be too close to me and I’d wind up holding my head in an awkward position.  I have a bit more flexibility now, so I may give the larger monitor a try.

 

I read all four books in the “Divergent” series.  The first one was interesting, but they went downhill from there.  By the end of “Four,” I really didn’t care what happened to the characters.  They weren’t delineated very well, and I’m sure I’m not the only reader who basically got tired of them.

 

 

On Apr 2, 2015, at 7:31 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I have not yet joined the tablet universe and so all of my Kindle reading has been on either my 24″ flat monitor or, mostly, on my 13″ laptop screen, which I read for an hour in bed each night before going to sleep. 

 

I hear people saying they can’t read online because of eye strain. I’m reading stuff on computer monitors all day and I’ve never had the slightest speck of eye strain. I don’t even know what eye strain is. I do have an issue with a slowly growing cataract in my left eye but that’s a different matter. Still just pesky, not yet a problem. 

 

I’m not reading as many books these days, whether print or Kindle, because I’m reading so much online. And my local library has abruptly stopped buying books in my favorite science categories–or any science category, for that matter: the space on the NEW BOOKS shelf is now jammed with cooking books, and diet books, and disease books, and relationship books, and homosexual preachment books. I went back into the stacks to find this week’s book, LAST APE STANDING, by a paleontologist who things the turning point in human evolution was the mutation that changed our big toe  from a thumb-like structure into the solid straight bone that makes it easy for us to stand upright. 

 

I’ve been beating the bushes trying to scare up fresh work and scrambling with my current clients…the Retirement Plan Advisor guy tells me something different every time I meet him and I change things into the way he wants, and then he tells me he sees no progress. 

 

I don’t know what is happening with the text for the apnea doctor’s site. He asked  me for a price for writing stuff. What stuff would you like me to write about? I asked. Two weeks later he gave me a list of five topics. Monday I gave him an estimate, and Tuesday he emailed me: “Ok. When can you meet to discuss further?”

 

“Anytime, at your convenience,” I said, and reminded him that I need a 50% deposit to get started. 

           

And he replied, 

“Am sorry Collin that was not  a reply for you.. 

I still need to think about your proposal”

 

Well, if it wasn’t a reply, what was it? The email was in our string and he didn’t include any cc’s to the design agency. The design agency has told him that they are not going to start on the Web design until all the text is written. If he doesn’t want any more text written, fine, but they won’t start on his site until he makes up his mind. 

 

So, my pay is floating elusively in the air in front of me and swatting at it with a butterfly net won’t help because it’s a virtual Web image. 

 

But, spring is here and the baseball season starts this weekend, yum. Maybe I’ll thumb through Thomas Boswell’s book again, WHY TIME BEGINS ON OPENING DAY. 

 

 

On Apr 11, 2015, at 8:41 AM, Rhonda Morley <rhondamorley14@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

I do not have a tablet, laptop or smart phone.  I do not read in bed.  However, I do get eyestrain once in awhile just from reading too long.  I never had eyestrain until Sjogren’s syndrome arrived along with lupus.  Said syndrome dries out eyes and mouth, and can have deleterious effects on kidneys.  I think my neck muscles would give out before anything else if I tried to read very much on my computer screen.

The last time I had serious eyestrain was when I basically read the 7 Harry Potter books one after the other.  Systane eye drops help, but only if you remember to apply them 4 times a day……

 

I’ve had cataract surgery on both eyes and no longer need glasses (except for reading.)  My distance vision is 20/20 in both eyes–better than it was before I had the surgery.  That was definitely one of the better medical experiences of my life

 

Late in February, I jumped through all the hoops to get my medicinal marijuana authorization.  I did not realize that medicinal marijuana includes much more than smokable or edible pot–all I am using so far are topicals, most of which do not contain THC.  Considering that I no longer smoke cigarettes, inhaling harsh smoke would be difficult.  As far as edibles, my stomach is more sensitive than it used to be, and it’s really difficult to “unswallow” something.  The topicals work great on smaller joints (wrists, ankles) but so far I have no found one that works well on hips.  I think the source of pain may be too deep for the medicine to penetrate.

 

Funny you should be having trouble with an apnea doctor–I went to one here in Spokane who spent all of every visit posting to his computer.  I guarantee that the man would not have recognized me if he had run into me in the hall directly after an office visit.  He diagnosed a sleep disorder (surprise, surprise) and prescribed a CPAP machine.  I used it for about a year, until I lost 20 pounds in the months preceding my breast cancer diagnosis and 15 pounds after.  The only reason I was relatively sure that I had sleep apnea to begin with is that I would wake up with Luc standing beside me on the bed.  As soon as I stirred, he would flop down with a big sigh.  I can only assume he was responding to a pause in my breathing.

 

Baseball…One can only hope that the Mariners come up with something to cheer about.  Onward & upward…..

 

 

On Apr 21, 2015, at 9:33 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’m okay. Sort of. It’s been a bad month. 

 

My landlord notified me of a $275 a month rent  increase. 

 

My downstairs neighbor drove up into the hills and shot himself.

 

I had a flat tire on my car. 

 

My cat is dying of Can’tPissitis. 

 

This afternoon my bicycle was stolen while I was in Safeway buying the cheapest pack of hot dogs and buns available.

 

I delivered a second draft of the Retirement Advisor brochure and the client says it’s no good, paragraphs have stuff he doesn’t want, and paragraphs are in the wrong sections, and I ask him which paragraphs are you talking about and he says he doesn’t have time for that.  How can I fix something if he won’t point out what needs to be fixed? 

 

I went to the office of the designer who’s making the brochure and he had no advice for me. He fell down the stairs on a drunken binge in Mexico and got ten stitches in his elbow, and the Mexican healthcare left him with a raging infection, and he’s been going to the hospital here every day for continuing treatment; besides that, the guy is functionally illiterate and is unable to tell good text from bad. 

 

The apnea doctor has still not said yes or no for the TIPS & GUIDES section of his Web site. 

 

I sent individual emails to 71 Web shops and ad agencies in Silicon Valley and the only ones to reply were guys who said they don’t have any work, either. 

 

I’ve been unable to strike up a conversation with anybody in the graphics/design business. I don’t know what else to do. A couple years ago I offered to build a new site for the Campbell Historical Museum, pro bono, just to get involved with local Chamber of Commerce types, etc, but the committee of Margaret Hamiltons cackled suspiciously and, eventually, declined my offer. To this day, if you go to the Museum site, you are unable to find out what’s in the museum or why you should go there. 

 

I’ve been emailing my ex-wife but she doesn’t want to talk about anything we ever did, or anybody we ever knew, or anything much about what she’s been doing for the last forty years. When I explain what I’ve been up to, I seem to be talking to the wall. I bring up new topics but nothing catches her interest. 

 

There was a comic-strip artist in Santa Barbara years ago who suffered a stroke but eventually recovered enough to resume the strip, but his characters were grotesquely distorted and he couldn’t tell the difference, and after a couple months he retired. I’m starting to wonder if that’s happened to me–maybe I’m just babbling incoherently and don’t know it. It looks okay to me, but nobody replies, and the clients reject it. 

 

I got some evidence in my favor from my old pal Jerry Dunn, a travel writer. He sent me a link to an article about the technology of writing in ancient days when you had to process a skin into parchment and mix a pot of ink to write anything. I replied with a brisk summary of a biography I read recently of Galen, the physician to Roman emperors whose books were all destroyed in Nero’s fire–Galen was still alive and he re-wrote all his books, the earliest medical treatises. 

 

Jerry replied, 

“You are such a clear, creative prose stylist! (Sounds like a great book, too.)”

 

So this gave me hope that my scribblings are still coherent enough to be read by some people. 

 

Other than that, I’m okay. For the moment. I’m healthy as a horse, but I’m on the way to the glue factory. 

 

On Apr 24, 2015, at 2:42 PM, Rhonda Morley <rhondamorley14@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

Well.  After reading that litany of misery, my month has been a walk in the park.  I’m very sorry to hear about Nuke–male cats are so prone to kidney failure.  I gave RC sub-q fluids every day for almost a year, and it did prolong his life.  But KC wasn’t having any of that, and he outlived RC by 3 weeks.

 

I am not a mind-reader.  If you want to discuss something, let me know–ask a question.  What do you think about ____?  Do you recall_____?  Your e-mails are generally narratives.  Expecting me to pick out what you want me to react to is like dropping 20 hooks in the water and expecting the fish to grab #4  and #11.

 

 

On Apr 25, 2015, at 5:39 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I’ve been blabbing away on all kinds of topics but I don’t know what, if anything, you’re interested in hearing about. I’ve been rattling around doing all kinds of things over the years, and now I’m old and looking back. There’s nobody else in my life who’s still alive or in contact with me who knew me way back when, from before I started working at Santa Barbara Magazine, except for my siblings. My story is old news to them. 

 

I always wanted to be a freelance writer, and after we split up, I became one. H.L. Mencken had a family friend who had a nephew who wanted to become a writer, and wanted Mencken’s advice for that career path. Mencken said, “Tell him to put his revolver to his head and pull the trigger six times as fast as he can. It will be easier in the long run. “

 

I like to gossip. When I go to Santa Barbara,  my brother Matt spends a lot of time playing Solitaire on the computer—he’s not interested in blabbing about people. I sit up late yakking with his wife Nancy swapping stories about people we know. 

 

One time Ed Siever told me he had a habit of testing people by telling them confidential things, and then waiting to see if that information floated around in the circle of acquaintances, to see who was loose-lipped and who was not. I was surprised to find out I’d passed his test as a closed-mouth one. 

 

I’ve never been able to figure out how to use my skills to my own advantage. I’ve never been able to overcome the hatred my mother had for my skills and talents. It’s wrong for me to be so self-deprecating, but it was hammered into me: if Colin did it, then it is ipso facto inconsequential. 

 

I always thought that my good works would speak for themselves.  I wrote a brochure for a guy who made electric guitar pickups one time—actually he wanted a kick-ass rock & roll poster, but I persuaded him to present his story in a brochure that was to be distributed at the NAMM show, the trade show for the National Association of Music Manufacturers. The guy’s wife told me of her eternal hatred for me because of the way I’d ignored what they wanted and she was ashamed to take the 15,000 brochures because they were so crappy, but I had her over a barrel. 

 

At the convention, the brochure was the hit of the show. People wanted the brochure and all 15,000 copies were distributed. She was dazed when she returned and had to order another 15,000. She apologized and told me she would never doubt me again. Over the next few years the company sold 300,000 copies of the brochure for two dollars apiece. 

 

I got my $500 fee. The company blossomed and became the biggest brand in the electric guitar pickup industry. The next year I wrote a poster for them and was invited to attend the NAMM show with them. Did you ever hear of Mel Bay? He published all kinds of instruction books for learning to play stringed instruments. At the convention, Mel Bay himself sought me out and said he wanted to shake my hand, because I had changed the face of music-biz advertising. 

 

I thought subsequent work would fall into my hands—I thought everybody would want to use me and get similar success. Nope. I continued to struggle. A few years later I heard that a new ad agency in Santa Barbara was hiring and I went in for an interview, and when I was showing my portfolio and got to the guitar pickup brochure, the guy abruptly ended the interview. “I happen to know the guy who actually wrote that,” he said, and named the art director who’d worked with me on the brochure, who had taken all the credit. 

 

Similar events continued to happen to me. I wrote a brochure for one of the first thin-film hard disk manufacturers in the US, and it was a big success, and one day I drove down to Ventura to the ad agency that had produced it in order to pry a check from the agency for an unrelated project, and while I waited in the lobby I saw a newspaper framed on the wall: it was a front-page article in the Los Angeles Times’ Sunday business section profiling the ad agency owner and the innovative brochure he’d written. The agency owner came into the lobby and saw me reading the article and he turned beet red and gave me my check and I never heard from him or his agency again.

 

But, I don’t know if this kind of stuff is of any interest to you. 

 

 

On Apr 30, 2015, at 9:10 AM, Rhonda Morley <rhondamorley14@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

Yes, it is interesting to me to see what you did over the years.  Am I to assume that you would be interested in what I did over those same years?  Not being much of a gossip, I never thought anyone would want to hear about those years.  I’m of a mind with Matt–sooner get on the link and play solitaire.  But, if you’re interested, I can talk a bit about me and mine over the decades.  

 

I have to make this short, as I am fighting some hellacious infection that makes it hard to sit.  I’ll be talking to the doctor today and hopefully getting a remedy.

 

 

On May 2, 2015, at 11:48 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Happy birthday, Rhonda. 

 

Yes, I would like to know what you’ve been up to over the years. 

 

I’m hoping that May will be better for me than April was. I’ve managed to scrape up a couple of fresh projects–a Web site for a flight training school, and text for a site offering 3D visualizations of architectural blueprints. Other things are burbling…perhaps a job making a new site for an eye-care insurance company, EyeMax, and a person in China named Jinxiong  is asking me about writing text for their electronics products. 

 

With any luck I’ll soon be able to afford to buy a fresh bicycle. It’s strange having to walk everywhere.  I keep taking the same paths I would have taken on the bicycle, and mis-judging the time it takes to cross a street, and cars have been honking at my pedestrian ass all over the place. 

 

 

On May 2, 2015, at 11:55 AM, Rhonda Morley <rhondamorley14@yahoo.com> wrote:

 

Well, I got a remedy of sorts–my doctor was out of town, but the nurse was able to arrange for some drugs.  I have to call on Monday morning for an appointment to make sure my problem is not related to the chronic kidney disease diagnosed 3 or 4 years ago.  The CKD has been stable up to this point.

 

My sister-in-law sent me some lovely scented shower gel, and being an idiot at times, I decided to actually take a shower instead of a bath.  I HATE SHOWERS!!  Not only did I get water in both ears and shampoo in both eyes, every time I closed my eyes my balance went awry.  I got clean, which is the point, but it’s the bath for me.  I can’t read in the shower, nor soak my sore neck muscles.  Plus there’s that whole Psycho thing–I never saw the movie, but I noticed this morning that you can’t hear anything with the shower going.

 

After we split up, my premier goal was to support myself, and I did, though sometimes not in the fashion I would have liked.  There was a tiny studio basement apartment in Hazel Park that I considered the low point of my life, as far as housing went.  As I recall, it was $90/month, utilities included.  It had a tiny kitchen with a stove and refrigerator that worked.  It was also very secure (and in violation of fire codes, I am sure) as there was only 1 entrance/exit, and that door would wake the dead when it was opened.  

 

I don’t know if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in, so give me a clue when you reply.  Also, do you want my opinions on the things you’ve “been blabbing away on” or not?  Because you have once again presented me with a narrative, with no direction as to the conversation you want to have.

 

 

On May 3, 2015, at 7:24 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Yes, that’s the kind of thing I’m interested in. Was that the apartment where I helped you out when you were recovering from your cracked back from the roller rink?

 

And I’m interested in your opinions about the stuff I’ve been blabbing about–that’s why I’ve been blabbing about it, trying to find something you were interested in enough to remark about. 

 

I’m a shower guy, but I was a bath man until I quit smoking. Because you can’t smoke in the shower, and I was a continuous smoker. Four packs a day, by the time I quit on my 30th birthday. One of my excuses for not quitting was that I smoked while I was writing and I was afraid that if I quit smoking it would constipate  my writing process. In the actual world, I now write more in one month, every month, than I did in my entire smoking career combined. 

 

 

On May 9, 2015, at 10:32 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Something is wrong with my Yahoo e-mail.  I got about 3 paragraphs written to you and received a message across the bottom of the screen that the draft had not been saved.  I tried to send the message immediately, and the message was “unable to send.”  I tried to reply to another friend’s email and got the same message.  Dirty words…

 

The gist of the message I attempted to send you is this:  One of my pet peeves is friends who shove advice at me when all I’m trying to do is rant, blow off steam, get something out of my system.  Men are usually the biggest offenders, but women do it too.  I think I was trying hard to avoid putting myself in the position of giving unwanted advice.  

 

I am now going back to Yahoo to see if I can resolve the problem.

 

On May 10, 2015, at 10:14 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I’m going to run a full security scan–other parts of my computer are jerky, slow, or otherwise compromised.  Part of the e-mail that Yahoo ate explained that I am fighting a UTI without benefit of antibiotics.  It was diagnosed last Wednesday, but the doctor wanted the lab to isolate the responsible bug before he prescribes antibiotics.  So–I’m a non-geek who’s not at the top of her game.  

 

 

On May 11, 2015, at 9:53 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

At the risk of offering unwanted advice, you could always write your messages in a word processor and then paste them into an email and if the email vanishes, you won’t have lost anything. 

 

 

On May 11, 2015, at 9:59 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Even geeks get problems. I spent the weekend erasing my main hard drive and re-installing all my software and searching to find all my serial numbers, because my mouse has become erratic.   When I click on a folder on the desktop and try to move it around, I can’t let go of it–the folder or file clings to the arrow-tip of the cursor, and I had to unplug the mouse from the computer to get back to normal. 

 

A minor problem, and it only crops up during the critical moments, grumble. Sometimes unplugging and replugging the mouse doesn’t work, and I have to reboot the computer. Just what you need when the deadline is approaching and the client is clamoring for the job to be finished.

 

I tried a different mouse, attached it to a different USB port, removed all other USB devices, nothing worked. So far, yesterday’s re-installation of the Macintosh operating system and all my applications seems to have worked. 

 

And it’s not as bad as a UTI. 

 

 

On May 11, 2015, at 11:01 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

No, I don’t mind the advice–if I had known Yahoo was going to do that, I might’ve thought to write in a word processor, altho cutting & pasting is right up there with downloads on my list of THINGS THAT SCREW UP NO MATTER WHAT I DO…..

 

 

 

On May 13, 2015, at 9:01 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Aaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhh.  Response from Yahoo:  this is a current known issue with our system. (Well bully for you)  Engineering is aware and is working to resolve this for all customers.  You can try these troubleshooting steps, but it’s unlikely to fix it for you at this time.  (Then why waste time telling me??)

 

 The full security scan wasn’t wasted, as it did remove the jerkiness from other parts of the computer.  I must say I’ve never had the “sticky mouse” problem.  If unplugging it didn’t work for me, I’d have to take the computer to someone else to fix it.  

 

I don’t consider your advice on geek items uninvited.  I am smart enough to know what I don’t know, and to ask experts and take their advice.  I have been tempted to buy one of those “windows for dummies” or “computers for geezers” self-help books—and, upon reflection, not sure why I haven’t??  

 

I must confess I am still stymied about what kind of reply to make to your email of April 25.  Do you want me to tell you what I agree with and what I disagree with?  As you asked no questions, I really don’t know where to begin.  I don’t know if you remember this or not, but I was never the great communicator.  At work, I never had any problem communicating with people who owed money, but I was negotiating from a position of power.   Personal interactions are never as clear-cut.

 

So–I finally started on an antibiotic yesterday, and have hopes of feeling better soon!   I guess we’ll have to use this e-mail account until Yahoo gets its act together.

 

 

On May 14, 2015, at 5:31 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Well, I don’t know what kind of reply I’m seeking. I don’t remember much about our years together. I don’t remember what kind of person I was, let alone whether or not you were a great communicator. 

 

You fell into your bipolar disorder, while I pursued megalomania. Forty years ago, I decided I’d had enough of the Woodward Strip world I was living in and I took a bus ride back to California and  started actually writing instead of just talking about it.  And I haven’t shut up yet. 

 

I’ve spent my life endlessly reviewing everything I’ve done and what I should have done. I’ve been blabbing to you about this and that, trying to see if anything sparked your interest. You said you were looking for something to read, in one email, and I sent links to a couple of the best sci-fi cat stories of all time, for instance, and you gave me not a hint of response. “Stop sending me stories, I have my own tastes,” would have been informative. 

 

I don’t know anything about your interests. I don’t know why you quit the IRS when you were on the verge of your five-year vesting. I’m curious about every aspect of your life. When I joined the BBS universe in 1987, the precursor to the Web, I told many stories about us and they attracted a lot of readers. 

 

Not that you were the main focus of my postings…the youngsters on-line enjoyed my tales of my early farm life, too, and my battles with the bonehead bureaucracies of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and my dazzling adventures as an early adopter of the Macintosh laser printer that was disrupting the adbiz and print world.  

 

I always wondered what you were up to, and I mentioned that I had an imaginary version of you as a freelance skip-tracer, but that was just my own projection. I’m a freelancer and so I see freelancing everywhere. I should have known that you’d find a government job. 

 

I’m just seeking perspective about my life. I don’t understand why I’m not rich and famous. Perhaps that’s just the megalomania speaking, but I have evidence of my worth–and my invisibility. Another example was when I ran the Great American Smokeout campaign for a few years for the Santa Barbara branch of the American Cancer Society. My pro bono work. One year, my campaign attracted a lot of attention and it won the second prize, nationally, for all Smokeout campaigns that year. http://colin.org/Copywriting/Other/Smokeout/Smokeout.html

 

A couple years later, we were planning the next Smokeout campaign and I had some clever ideas, but my art director said, “How come we always do your ideas? When do we get to do one of MY ideas?” He was working pro bono, too, and so I said, sure, let’s do your idea this year. 

 

His idea was to use the budget to buy a lot of huge teddy bears and take a photo of them with his two darling pre-school daughters with lots of pink ribbons everywhere. It was a cute picture and had nothing to do with quitting smoking and nobody ever noticed it except for the grandparents of the girls. 

 

But, a couple of years later when we were pondering the next Smokeout campaign, all the Cancer Society ladies firmly remembered that it was the teddy-bear photo that won the Silver Award. Oh well, at least I got a free t-shirt out of it. 

 

 

 

 

On May 19, 2015, at 7:43 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

This will be short; this is the first time I’ve turned on the computer in 5 days other than to pay a bill.  Last Thursday, sometime during the day, a mosquito bit me on the OTHER foot, this time on my Achilles tendon about 2 inches from the sole of my foot.  My instep swelled so much that I could put my foot on the floor and not touch heel nor toes to the floor.  I have spent the last few days icing and elevating–and cussing–and now at least my whole foot touches the floor.  

 

But today I need to go grocery shopping and dog food shopping, and I need to do it before the swelling gets out of hand (out of foot?).  More later.

 

 

On May 23, 2015, at 2:37 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I need an answer to my questions:  What–exactly–did you mean by “…fell into your bipolar disorder,”  Is that like falling into quicksand?  a bed of roses?  a hole I didn’t see?  Or is it just a snide little jab, like you should have known I’d find a government job?

 

On May 23, 2015, at 4:12 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

 

1.

to drop or descend under the force of gravity, as to a lowerplace through loss or lack of support.

2.

to come or drop down suddenly to a lower position,especially to leave a standing or erect position suddenly,whether voluntarily or not:

to fall on one’s knees.

3.

to become less or lower; become of a lower level, degree,amount, quality, value, number, etc.; decline:

The temperature fell ten degrees. Stock prices fell to a new low for the year.

 

I assumed that you did not embrace bipolarity as a voluntary option. It was something that happened to you, something for which you sought treatment ten years after we split up. I have no idea when the onset was. I don’t recall ever thinking you were bipolar. 

 

In my mind, everything was my fault because of my inability to earn a living with my megalomaniac delusions.  I attempted to be a normal guy with a normal job for a few years but I was no good at it, and I decided to go back to my delusions of being a writer because it couldn’t have been worse than my abject poverty of being an unemployed truck driver. 

 

I don’t see what’s snide about my belated realization that you would have sought the safety and security of another government job, rather than opening your own skip-tracer shop the way my freelancer projections fantasized it. 

 

 

On May 26, 2015, at 9:04 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I know what fall means, and I still think it was a very weird way to refer to ANY medical diagnosis.  That diagnosis came at the end of a stay in a mental hospital.  The psychiatrist explained to me that I was lacking, or had an insufficient amount of, a certain neurotransmitter, and that he had had considerable success in treating cases like mine with lithium.  Within a few days, it seemed as if the world had snapped into focus.  The doctor said no group or individual therapy was needed, that he might as well try to treat diabetes with talk therapy.  This treatment was a turning point in my life–within 2 months I had the job I would hold for the next 22 years until the symptoms of lupus made it impossible to continue.

 

Considering your bias against doctors and medicine, I don’t think my reaction was off the mark.  Speaking of medicine……I apparently have a severe allergic reaction to mosquito bites.  I got a bite on the other foot, right in the middle of my Achilles tendon, dammit.  Same symptoms as on the other foot, same monopolization of my time applying ice, elevating foot, etc.  

 

I don’t think you have megalomania–at least I don’t think you’ve ever operated under the delusion that you actually ARE Bill Gates, or Donald Trump, or just yourself, rich and famous.  Such delusions are the defining points of a megalomaniac.    But there is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to be rich and famous.  Rich I could handle; famous not so much.  

 

I had just over 2 years in with the IRS.  In the 2-3 months before I quit, the powers that were decided that the collection of the “Vietnam phone tax” was the number 1 priority for revenue officers.  These were small amounts, usually under $10, accrued by war protestors who did not want to support the war in any way, especially by an almost-hidden tax on phone services.  None of these protestors had accessible bank accounts or other reachable assets. Collecting was next to impossible.  The final straw came when 4 officers in San Diego were ambushed and shot.  If I had been more mature, or if I had been treated with lithium at that point in my life, I probably would have stayed with the IRS.  But I wasn’t, and I didn’t, and that is long ago and far away and water under the bridge.

 

 

On May 31, 2015, at 11:22 AM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

One of the greatest discoveries of my life was finding out that California did not have mosquitoes, when we arrived in 1969. That alone was enough to make me love the state forever. 

 

Sure, there are mosquitoes here, but not in the hordes we suffered in Michigan. Swing a pint jar and get a quart of mosquitoes. Here, I get about two bites a year. 

 

I’m megalomaniac in that I believe my personal contributions are important to the projects I work on. Some of my writer friends say that they were part of a team that created stuff for mega-giant clients, and they can’t point to a single actual thing that they personally created. When I was at BBDO Detroit, my co-workers on the Creative staff were always telling me not to fight city hall, go along to get along, don’t make waves. I said we were producing crap and I’m not happy producing crap. Yes, but we’re getting paid well, they said. 

 

And then the agency lost the account because we were creating crap. 

 

So I came back to California and continued to be an irritant. Nobody likes an irritant, but that’s how pearls get made. 

 

 

On Jun 6, 2015, at 6:39 PM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I have to agree with you–lack of mosquitoes is one of the most attractive things about California.  We don’t have anything like Michigan mosquitoes here, but I guess it only takes one to find me and inflict a nasty bite.  I’ve taken to spraying my socks with Deep Woods Off.  

 

I had intended to reply to you sooner than today, but I have been dealing with a shitload of pain.  So much so that my terrible twin (aka Ms Crankyboots) has been ruling the roost around here for the last few days.  Pain puts me on edge, and I am much more likely to snap at people.  Changes in barometric pressure seem to worsen joint pain, and we have had thunderstorms, warm sunny days, rain, hail.  Today it is 88 degrees and dry, so everything is better for the moment.

 

I get what you’re saying about personal contributions.  I guess that’s one of the reasons I never did well on group projects, unless, of course, the group was willing to do things my way (aka the right way…haha)  I remember some marathon negotiating sessions when I was on the training task force, and in some cases I think I just outlasted everybody.  Stubborn.

 

 

On Jun 8, 2015, at 8:17 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

My pain right now is in my butt. I scraped up enough cash to buy a crappy bicycle off CraigsList for $25, and the seat is a different size and shape and position than on my bike that was stolen, and I’m having to ease back into my routine because it hurts too much to do my usual 10 miles a day. I’ll get used to it. A stockboy at Safeway today told me that three more bicycles have been stolen from their premises since my bike was taken, one of them valued at $2,000. I

 

My other pain is some kind of joint or tendon gripes on my right side, since the onset of my right-half paresthesia five years ago.  Out of nowhere, it will feel as though I hammered 200 nails yesterday. It hasn’t affected my fingers so far, and the paresthesia is not advancing. But these pains are handled by three or four aspirin a week. 

 

I finished the brochure I was writing for the retirement advisor company, whew.  What a pesky project. We went through five drafts.  In an early draft, I started a paragraph by saying “Since 1989, Advanced Retirement Solutions has been…”

  

Nope, although the owner has been doing it since 1989, this particular company is only six years old. So, “1989” had to come out. Then in the next draft it had to go back in. And then it had to come out. 

 

The sleep doctor finally decided to hire me to do five pages of Sleep Tips & Guides for his Web site, and that project is complete now. Today I got a contact for a new project for a package design company. They’ve created a package for a new product for the beauty industry and  the client wants a little six-page booklet of instructions included. The client’s existing text is an illiterate mishmash, most likely generated in Asia. Not as bad as the “Engrish” examples you see posted around the Web, but of the same tin-eared ilk. “If the Creative Silk overlays are used without the cream, will conform to the skin in the usual manner and induce an effect of combining with the materials already on the skin surface, which will be subsequently removed after peeling to induce a cleaning procedure.”

 

What kind of marathon negotiating sessions did you do for the training task force? I have zero referents for those things. I was never in a non-marathon negotiating session, nor on either end of a training task force. 

 

 

On Jun 14, 2015, at 10:41 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

Can you replace the seat on said crappy bicycle?  I can’t imagine riding around on something uncomfortable.  Maybe the pressure on nerves has aggravated your joint/tendon pains–just a thought.  Crappy bicycle syndrome….

 

My widespread joint pains have calmed down somewhat, as the relative humidity has been under 30% since Monday,  The temp on Monday got to 96, which broke a record set in 1931.  It also broke a section of SR195 where 4 concrete slabs come together.  The Street Department said the joint was designed to expand, but somehow expanded too much and exploded the joint.  It looked like someone had taken a jackhammer to an area about 2 feet wide and extending across two lanes. Being a big fan of explosions, I would have liked to see it happen–from a safe vantage point, of course.

 

I started this e-mail last night, got interrupted once by a phone call and once by the computer switching to an unrelated screen several times.  I gave up and shut down.  Then this morning, it took me a couple of hours to get up and going again.  I finally walked away when I got to the point where things would start flying through the air (I learned a long time ago that I break, I fix.)  When I came back 15 minutes later to see what cryptic messages might await me, my sign-on screen was up just like nothing ever happened.  Grrrr…

 

 Some package directions are so funny they make it to the back page of Consumer Reports, but this month they weren’t “Engrish” but misleading labels about the origin of the product.  For instance, the label in a shirt says “An American Tradition” but it’s made in Bangladesh.  

 

The marathon  negotiating sessions consisted of line workers (me and others) trying to get a brand new training system in place (OJT and mentoring) as opposed to traditional methods (lectures, lectures, memorization, etc.)  We won. 

 

 

On Jun 18, 2015, at 8:41 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

I finally figured out what the problem with the seat is–my previous bike had a shock-absorber post for the seat to be mounted on. When I get a few bucks ahead I’ll buy one. 

 

Shutting down my computer is something that happens only at the end of the day. I turn it on at 630am and spend the whole day with it on. Everything in my life (except bicycling) is through my computer. I even watched the NBA championship playoff game on a computer feed rather than on TV because it was on at the same time as the Giants game. When I turn off the computer and go to bed, I have another computer at my bedside and I listen to BBC World News all night long with it. 

 

The “Engrish” job fell through. After I pointed out that the stuff was unintelligible and I’d need to interview the client to figure things out, the agency decided to send it all back to the client and let them re-write it themselves. 

 

This is my problem in the modern adbiz era: the agencies no longer care about copywriting. They’ve abdicated responsibility for the text to the client.If the text makes no sense, well, that’s no skin off the agency’s nose, if that’s what the client wants, that’s what the client gets. 

 

Tomorrow morning I’m meeting a guy who wants a site for his recycling business. He wants to become known as THE go-to company when you want your old carpet recycled. He’s picked out a template for the site but the template has places where text is supposed to go and he doesn’t know what to say. 

 

A year ago I wrote a blog entry about treating migraine with hypnosis, and this week the doctor finally put the blog entry on his site.  So I was finally able to brag about it on LinkedIn. I’m a social media denier, but LinkedIn is a necessity if I’m going to stay in business. 

 

 

On Jun 23, 2015, at 9:04 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

My computer gets turned on for task-specific sessions (one of those “tasks” may be a game interlude, of course) During hot weather, it is rarely on after around 1:00, as the AC blows directly on the computer operator’s neck and back.  I have a through-the-wall unit that has no vent adjustment due to the fact that when 2 otherwise intelligent people were remodeling 19 years ago, SOMEONE misplaced or threw away the facing for the air conditioner.  That facing had the adjustable vents, plus it covered up the less than attractive AC unit itself.  Kenmore would gladly sell me a replacement facing plate–for $165….I thought that was a rip-off for basically a 12×18 piece of plastic with vents and an opening for the controls.  So–my ugly AC gets the job done, so far, and during the cooler months I cover it with a curtain.

 

I don’t think the problem is just with the adbiz.  I think there is an accelerating decline in the use and appreciation of language arts.  I’m sure social media is partly to blame, as is the now-now-now approach to information.  If it’s just going to be read and discarded, who cares if the sentences are well-constructed or if everything is spelled correctly?  Relying on spell check produces errors like “horde” for “hoard.”  That particular error occurred in an otherwise well-written story I read recently.  An occasional columnist for the Spokesman-Review, Stefanie Pettit, refers to herself as the curmudgeonly grammarian.  In her column, she points out and bemoans flaws in common usage, such as “for her and I” and “me & her went south on the grammar trail…..”  Language smiths are becoming few and far between.

 

I’ve been urged by a couple of people to join LinkedIn, but I thought it was more a business site.  Since I’m retired, I haven’t really looked into it.  What you said about it kind of confirms my opinion.

 

Ack!  I just heard the weather forecast for Sunday and Monday:  102 and 103, respectively.  In weather like that, I race to the grocery store, gas station, any other necessary trip, in the early morning, then hibernate through the worst of the heat.  Jesse gets tired of being outside in a real hurry when it’s that hot.  Pity the athletes who are taking part in Hoopfest this weekend (3-man basketball) on the streets of downtown Spokane, and in the Ironman Triathlon in Coeur d’Alene.

 

I watched most of the Stanley Cup play-offs this year–quite exciting.  Did you watch?  It seemed to me that the Tampa Bay goalie spent an inordinate amount of time away from the front of his net.  I do not know one other hockey fan to ask.  

 

I have to take Jesse for a nail trim this morning.  Just a couple of days ago, he pulled his little “scream at human & watch her jump” trick on me.  I hope he behaves today.  He is usually pretty good, except for the scream trick.  He waits until someone is ALMOST touching him, then shrieks like a banshee.  You wouldn’t believe that such a noise could come out of a normally silent 7-pound dog.  Here’s hoping no screams today.  By the way, I just thought of a hockey story–I’ll save it for next time.

 

 

On Jun 28, 2015, at 8:03 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

My interest in hockey faded to nil after Wayne Gretzky retired. Sometimes I’m nostalgic for Ye Olde Days when there were only 6 teams in the NHL…I went to every Red Wings home game in the 1964/65 season and I could identify every player in the league by sight. It was easier back then without helmets, of course. And the goalies used no masks…this was Red Wings goalie Terry Sawchuk:

 

I can still enjoy a hockey game but it requires all your attention. I can have a baseball or football game running and look up at it every so often and keep up with the action, but not so for hockey.  I never pay attention to basketball…I watched the NBA championship final game only because it was a Bay Area team, a local cultural event. The only basketball game I watched all season. I’ve been to one San Jose Sharks hockey game–a client invited me to attend a game along with a group from their office…I’ve been away from hockey fandom for a long time, but I knew more about hockey than all of the rest of the group put together. 

 

I’m still a total baseball freak.  I thought the Mariners would compete this year but Robinson Cano is having a crappy season and it doesn’t bother him a bit, he gets his $24 million a year no matter how poorly he plays–for the next nine years, too, until he’s 41 years old. The only thing keeping the Mariners out of the cellar is the Oakland A’s. I haven’t looked at any A’s games this year: they had a successful team last year and traded away every player. This year they put a team of flailing rookies on the field and nobody knows who they are. 

 

I’m savoring every game of the San Francisco Giants, who are at this moment one game behind the first-place Dodgers. I’ve only been to a handful of Giants games because tickets are almost impossible to get. I’ve been to lots of Oakland A’s games because the stadium is always empty. Years ago I went to the next-to-last game of the season and Ichiro Suzuki and the Seattle Mariners were in town, and Ichiro needed only two more hits to set a new all-time single-season record for most hits, and the A’s needed only one win to make it into the playoffs, but there was hardly anybody at the game except Japanese media. 

 

The Giants have sold out all 43,311 seats for 370 consecutive home games, the all-time National League record. 

 

 

Yeah, LinkedIn is a business site. THE business site. If I get an inquiry from somebody these days, the first thing I do is look them up on LinkedIn. If they don’t have a LinkedIn profile, they’re probably not worth bothering with. 

 

And if they do have a LinkedIn profile, it’s probably all lies. Well, maybe not lies, but I look at the profiles of people I know and I see that they pad their stats, they leave out their debacles and fudge their timelines. The new rule of thumb is that you’re nobody unless you have over 500 “connections”–people you’re linked to. I’m at a piddly 123:

 

It’s a fraud-riddled site, but it’s what we have. Right now I’m cautiously negotiating with a guy named Ilyas Zameer, and everything I know about him comes from LinkedIn. I’m having Anglo-Saxon-centric difficulties…I had a meeting with the guy and the other men in the meeting were Sandeep Talwar, Rij Eappen, and Sadeq Rahman, and I have a hard time thinking of these words as “names.” They’re from India but their headquarters are in the United Arab Emirates and they run the most famous SaaS solutions in Asia. They say. 

 

“SaaS” is “Software as a Service” and it’s a major buzzword these days. By studying this company’s existing literature you can discover nothing about what they do, except that they have a very high opinion of themselves. They sell a product called T-Portal. Here’s what they say about it:

 

“T-Portal’s ability to extended your offering to sub agent network across the globe help you built bigger sales force as it offer multi currency billing & reporting mechanism, strong credit control, instant or on request transaction ability made it more secure.” 

 

I’m still carefully trying to find out what they want done. If I can figure it out, maybe I’ll be able to scrape together the August rent. 

 

I had a hectic week scrambling around to find the July rent. I’m almost sure I’ve got it–I sent invoices and all I have to do is hassle the clients into paying me, and if everybody pays up, I’ll have $15 more than my rent! 

 

 

On Jul 3, 2015, at 8:41 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

OK, we’ll start with the hockey story:  At a conference in Olympia, I found myself at dinner with 2 supervisors from my office, 1 male, 1 female, and a male supervisor from the Tacoma office named Ray.  I had been on several work groups with Ray, and knew him to be a narcissistic blowhard who liked to be the center of attention.  He had been blathering on about several sports, and then started talking about hockey.  I can’t remember EXACTLY what he said that prompted me to say something, but I held up a cautioning index finger and said:  Ah yes, but the finest front line in the history of hockey was Howe, Mahovlich and Delvecchio.  Ray changed the subject.  Good thing, too–I had just exhausted my repertoire of hockey trivia.  I didn’t even know I was going to say that until I blurted it out, and I guess I have you to thank for the fact that it was in my head.

 

I kind of got captured by the first play-off game, and having a soft spot (note that I didn’t say where) for Chicago teams in general, I watched the whole series.  But you’re right–a hockey game requires  full attention.  I’ve taken naps during football and baseball games and not missed anything crucial.  It’s been so long since I watched a hockey game I was fuzzy on the penalties.  Other than the personal fouls, like tripping or high-sticking, I could only remember icing and offsides.  And then I wasn’t sure how they were committed!  I’m not much of a baseball fan–my mother was.  If the Mariners stepped up to the plate, so to speak, perhaps I could be.

 

Well, I took Jesse in for his nail trim and he was a perfect little gentleman–no screaming at the vet tech and making her drop her clippers (that HAS happened in the past.)  He has to go back on July 7 for his 6-month wellness check and 12-month blood work.

 

I haven’t checked out LinkedIn–how would I describe myself?  Retired curmudgeonly grammarian?  

 

We are still experiencing ultra hot weather and dangerous fire conditions: high 90s temps, mid-teens humidity and tonight winds up to 25 mph.  One match, one firework mishandled and we have another wildfire.  There has already been a fire near Wenatchee that claimed 24 homes and about 4000 acres.  It raced down the mountain toward the downtown and burning embers carried by wind started a fire in some warehouses inside the city limits of Wenatchee.   Scary stuff.

 

I hope your invoices all brought results–I must say I admire your aplomb.  In your situation I would be losing it.  I would be so anxiety-ridden it would probably be affecting my health–blood pressure, etc.  As far as your Indian clients are concerned, someone should create a website called Tense-In, or Tensability, or maybe Tense-Sense.  Half the reason foreign copy doesn’t scan is that they get the tenses all wrong–small wonder–many Americans get their tenses wrong.

 

Is Nuke still with us?

 

 

 

On Jul 7, 2015, at 1:45 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

Nuke is clinging to existence. These days, when he is awake he relentlessly pesters me to play with him. He’s always been psychotically fixated on the twist wires that come wrapped on power cords when you open a new small appliance. 

 

I made a spare-no-expense cat toy for him from a three-foot steel rod and a length of thread. His fervor had flagged over the years until a few weeks ago when he deposited a zip-tie at my feet. I attached it to the cat toy and he has been non-stop bonkers about it. 

 

He’s still not well. He’s hardly pissing at all, as far as litterbox evidence. Maybe he’s taught himself to pee in the toilet. His appetite remains normal, his coat is glossy and well groomed, but he’s remote and in discomfort half the time. 

 

I’ve been to hardly any hockey games since the last time I saw you. We went to the Red Wings at Kings game in Los Angeles in 1972 or so–it was Gordie Howe’s farewell tour, his last appearance in Los Angeles, and I decided to go see him. A spur of the moment thing. The Kings were averaging about 6,000 fans per game in an 18,000-seat arena so there were plenty of tickets available, but it turned out that all of California also decided on the spur of the moment to see Gordie’s last game, and we stood in line for tickets. We heard the roar as Howe scored the first goal, and another roar as he set up a goal by Delvecchio, but we didn’t get to our seats until the second period when the score was already 2-0. And that was the final score.

 

In 1990 was talking hockey on-line in the Santa Barbara BBS network and a bunch of us decided to attend a Kings game–I wanted to see Wayne Gretzky in person, so I prodded an excursion group into existence. And then when we got to the arena, another game in the league had finalized all the playoff rankings and so the Kings prudently withheld Gretzky from the game. 

 

I went to a Red Wings game at the Joe Louis Arena sometime in the 80s while on a Christmas visit to Detroit. Somebody in our group pointed out a player and said, Colin, that guy looks just like you.  We looked him up on the roster list and his name turned out to be Colin Campbell. Later he became a high-ranking executive in the NHL. 

 

 

All of my invoices got paid in time for the rent. Right now I’m in a vast empty void of zero work. Everything fell through with the Indian client…I asked them what aspects they wanted to change in their existing text, and they were affronted by my suggestion there was something wrong with their text, which was well received in India, they would have me know, and they severed connections. 

 

The sleep doctor finally put my Tips & Guides onto his site. http://svchestsleep.com/guides-tips/ 

I wrote five but he only has placed two of them so far. He says he wants another one, Insomnia, one of these days. 

 

I’ll have a little work when the Saratoga Walk-In Clinic closes next week. As I predicted, the doctor has not proved able to cope with his practice after undergoing quadruple bypass surgery in February. He’s retiring to Traverse City  and I’ll be creating a farewell page and a page for patients to request a copy of their medical record. Two or three hours’ work, max. He was hoping to sell his practice but instead he just sold the building and the clinic will be converted to some other task. 

 

Other than that, 

 

 

On Jul 13, 2015, at 8:04 AM, Rhonda <msrnmorley@aol.com> wrote:

 

I’m sorry the news about Nuke isn’t better–it seems that kidney problems afflict a large proportion of male cats.   KC had a similar fixation on the twist ties that come on bread bags.  If you balled up a couple of them, he would fetch them. 

 

I read your copy on the sleep doctor site–clear and well-written.  I thought it was odd, though, that the doctor treats “Chest and Sleep”.  That’s a strange combination, don’t you think?  Like “Feet and Liver” or some such.

 

I got most of my regular appointments done in the past month, including a bone density test.  I have lost 2 inches in height, dammit!  But the good news is that I don’t have osteoporosis–just a minor thinning of wrist bones that I can treat with weight-bearing exercises.  So I dug out my 1-pound and three-pound weights.  Ugh.  I HATE exercising.

 

I have not been to a pro hockey game since that Kings game in LA.  I’ve watched some on TV.  Spokane has a “farm club” (that’s baseball, right?) hockey team called the Chiefs.  Wayne Gretsky was in town last week, playing with the amateurs in something called World of Hockey.  There were other professionals, too, but I didn’t recognize any names.

 

Jesse is not feeling well this morning.  He didn’t eat his food, and he just ambled around outside nibbling on grass after he relieved himself.  I haven’t seen him drink any water, and he can’t seem to settle down anywhere.  I take that back–he has settled into a Sphinx pose in front of my desk.  I don’t want to let him eat too much grass.  Pasha (my dachshund) did that once and had to have surgery to remove the fermenting mass from her stomach–it was the size of a softball.

 

 

 

On Jul 15, 2015, at 9:36 PM, Colin Campbell <colin@colin.org> wrote:

 

The doctor did not request my opinion when he named his practice. I don’t know whether to blame his English skills on his upbringing in India or whether Chest & Sleep Medicine was already the name of the practice when he bought it from a retiring physician last year. 

 

I hate exercising, too, but I hate being flabby more.  I don’t remember if I exercised while we were together. Maybe my handstands were exercise. I’ve been strong since my farmboy days…when I started working at Sears, I was coming off a job as a lineman for the phone company, a pole climber, and I had a lot of upper-body strength from it…I remember one time when one of the Sears Advertising guys slapped me on the back as an atta-boy, and then he recoiled and said, My god, you’re as hard as a rock. 

 

I’ve never known my own strength. One night at Hosmer’s Bar & Grill an arm-wrestling contest broke out, and people pressured me into the game, and I beat everybody. Surprised the hell out of me. But I was working as a truck driver at the kitchen countertop company and each day I loaded 8′ countertops onto the truck…they weighed 96 pounds and I carried them three at a time.

 

That was 1974 or 1975. Then I took the bus to Santa Barbara and never did manual labor again, but I kept playing softball all the time. And I developed a system of exercises to strengthen my back–and I’ve never had any back trouble again. 

 

I’ve been bicycling nine or ten miles a day since 1981. I guess that counts as exercise. But I don’t hate it–I love being on my bike. I’m back in the saddle now, I found another cheap bike on CraigsList–I splurged and went up to the $30 level for this one, and it has a nice comfy seat, unlike the previous cheapo bike. The hard-seated bike conked out on me–the front wheel locked up and would not turn. And then with all my tools and all the tools at a friend’s machine shop, we were unable to remove the front wheel to diagnose the problem. So that bike went into the landfill.

 

 

This week I wrote a “Beauty Guide” for some cosmetics product, CREATIVE SILK, explaining how to rub this nanoparticle goo on your face to look 90 years younger overnight. My job was to turn the overseas Engrish of the instruction brochure into a reasonable facsimile of something that makes sense. 

 

So that project has kept Colin out of the landfill, for the moment. 

 

I had an odd phone call over the weekend–a guy called me from the floor of Comic Con, the annual comics convention in San Diego. Jim Clark is a moderately successful author of graphic novels–his book THE GUNS OF SHADOW VALLEY was nominated for the Eisner Award last year, the Oscar of the comics industry. 

 

I started an on-line magazine back in 1989, perhaps the first on-line fiction magazine in the universe, and Jim was one of the early contributors. He sought my advice on fiction-writing and I guess I kind of mentored him. I knew him on-line for twenty years before meeting him in person for the first time. 

 

Anyway, at the convention he got into a discussion with an artist and bashed out a story idea and came to an agreement to do a new graphic novel, and then he got worried that I would think he stole the idea from me, because part of the plot was similar to my story, WE ARE HERE TO HEAL YOU, which enjoyed a mild popularity at one time.  http://www.swagazine.com/issue1/heal.html

 

He wanted my blessing to use the idea before signing the contract with the publisher; I said sure. There aren’t any new ideas in fiction. I told him about an incident at the Toronto World Science Fiction Convention, when writer David Gerrold was under a cloud even though everybody was thrilled with his new novel THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF. The cloud wasn’t about his book, it was about his authorship of a famous STAR TREK episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles.” Somebody had pointed out that the Tribbles story line was exactly similar to chapter 8 of a Heinlein novel, THE ROLLING STONES, involving the rapid reproduction of alien critters that looked like furry frisbees. 

 

I’d been hoping to talk to Gerrold at the convention–you probably don’t recall that we had lunch with him and Larry Niven at the convention in Los Angeles, or rather had lunch at the same table with him and some other fans–but he was despondent about the accusations of plagiarism and stayed in his hotel room and didn’t mix around. 

 

And then Robert Heinlein sent an announcement in support of Gerrold: Heinlein stole the idea from somebody else, a story from 1906, PIGS IS PIGS, about the rapid reproduction of guinea pigs during a bureaucratic mixup at a railroad station, and after the public announcement Gerrold was able to show himself (but he was too mobbed by fans for me to shove through the crowd to talk to him). 

 

Anyway, Jim Clark had never heard of that episode  (it happened before he was born), and of course neither of us are on a par with those two Hugo-winning sci-fi authors. But his call gave me feeling that I’d accomplished some faint tinge of what I was after when I was a young guy– a moderately known author at the largest  comics convention in the world called me from the busy convention floor, just to touch base about a contract. It was some slight validation of my life’s efforts. 

 

Probably Jim was worried because of a row we had about plagiarism 22 years ago: he submitted a story to my on-line magazine, and I published it, and then it turned out to be a 100% plagiarism of a Roger Zelazny story, and I castigated him about it. He didn’t do anything like that again. Ten years ago I made a Web site to promote his graphic novel of 2005, SCAR TISSUE, that was his first hit. It was about an ordinary human who had a heart transplant–and the donor was a superhero; so with the super heart, the human started to show vestiges of super-powers. 

http://colin.org/ScarTissue/ScarTissue.html