Day: September 16, 2022

Anniversaries, so to speak

Karl Elvis3 Comments

I was trying to find dates for something nearly 20 years back. 

Anniversaries, so to speak – when I met certain people, when certain social things happened. 

I like to commemorate things like that, or al least acknowledge them. We met X years ago, that sort of thing. 

There’s a cluster of those dates coming up. When I wrote Wanton, for example, which is very much the beginning of a period of life for me (I tend to list that as Nov ’03 but it was probably more like spring of that year; I have no record of the actual writing, though, only mention of it in email archives when I first shared it, fall of ’03, and when I first published it, Nov ’03, so that’s where I put that date). 

Things happen after that writing only partly connected. I definitely found a number of kindred souls, who responded to it with the same intensity with which I wrote it. But also the making of it produced something in me, in terms of wanting to reach out and communicate differently. 

When I started blogging (encouraged by people I shared my novella with like Jen & Circe). When I first connected to people I got to be close to after they read my work (Doxy, a number of others). 

And then orkut – there are probably a bunch of things in my archives about orkut, and I should write a whole piece about it now, near 20 years later. But it was, for a while, the best social network that has ever or will ever be, until it collapsed under the weight of expansion too fast. But it was founded in ’04 and I joined not long after. So I met a lot of people who impacted my life in positive ways, may of which i’d still consider friends, even if we rarely talk (Gregg C and Andie being the most important, with a half dozen others I retain on facebook as friends).

Nearly 20 years ago, which in terms of the internet, is a geologic age. 

But I was trying to fix specific days, because once I started wondering, it mattered to be exact. If one is trying to commemorate an anniversary, saying ‘fall of that year’ doesn’t do it. 

I thought all my email from that era had been purged when I transitioned from an old-style mbox based, command line email (elm, and then mutt, for those geeky enough to care what I mean), and started using apple Mail.app (I will always prefer Mutt, but getting it to play nicely with modern email just started to seem like too much work).

I found it all the other day, though, archived at work, compressed and saved as an archive ‘just in case’. 

It took some digging to find the conversations I needed, but I got specific dates for when we started talking, for various people.

Wow, what a trip it was, reading conversations 20 years old. Seeing evolutions of friendship, seeing how much effort I put into dialog. My own flirting style from 20 years back. Hell, I’d fall for me, I was good. 

In some ways it was painful; in 20 years there have been a lot of ups and downs in my life (in everyone’s), so some conversational branches remain uncomfortable to think about overmuch (I compartmentalize extremely well, but some compartments, I just do not want to look into, yet).

But in others, the warm glow of nostalgia for good times suffused me; truly excellent memories, brought back my snippets of conversation with a number of people.

I have not yet gone through all the archives; there are hundreds of separate conversations, grouped by email addresses I sometimes don’t even recall without opening up files. So there’s more treasure yet to find. But the dates I was specifically looking for, I found. I now know which days I met certain people, and when to mentally celebrate them, or us, or at least when we met. Which matters to me a great deal.

On getting strong

Karl Elvis1 Comment

So let’s talk about something other than writing for a moment, just because i’m almost repeating myself in the last few entries  (plus i’m really distracted by a poet i’ve been reading and need to not think about eroticism for a bit).

For the maybe one of you reading who hasn’t known me for years, I have an uneven history with physical fitness.

I grew up your quintessential fat kid. That’s not to say I wasn’t strong – I was, I was more or less born strong. But I wasn’t particularly athletic by inclination; I was a book nerd and always preferred reading to most anything else (well, until I was a teenager and discovered rock music, drugs and sex, at which time I was a book, music, drugs, and sex nerd, and I sorted that in the wrong order so assume it should be in reverse).

When I participated in sports that required brute strength I did well, but fast and agile, I wasn’t. I stayed fit, though, because any time I could get away from class and hike, that’s what I was doing (I went to school in what we used to call a ‘free school’ in the 70’s and would probably be called child-led-learning now, ie, everyone thought if you let kids choose, they’d keep wanting to learn. In reality of you let them choose, they’d rather play, so we did a lot of play.)

When I got out of school and started to work, though (and started to drink beer), the tendency to stay fit ended, and (apart from periods where cocaine tended to make me skinnier), I started to loose some of the strength and fitness.

It took me a long time to get fed up with that; I was strong enough, fit enough, to do what I needed. It wasn’t until my 30’s when I had my first child that I started to feel like I wasn’t gonna be able to keep up with a child (a child who turned out to be the energizer bunny).

So for the first time I got fed up enough to join a gym.

An aside here, the single biggest motivation in my life has always been being fed up. Most engineering projects, home improvement projects, self improvement projects, surgeries, etc, all start with goddamnit, i’ve had enough of this shit.

Read more “On getting strong”