Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

A bit of an update to Sarah Six-Pack, thanks to an article reposted by my dad that’s been carried on a few news sites.

Sarah and Todd Palin, who are just like everyone else, and going through hard economic times just like everyone else…

• Have a combined income of nearly a quarter-million dollars, five times the median household income for Wasilla.
• Own a single-engine plane, two boats, two personal watercraft and a half-million dollar custom built home on lakefront property.
• Have an established 401(k) retirement account.
• Own four other lakeside private recreation sites, covering 35 acres and recently appraised at $102,700.
• Pay $7,662/year in taxes on their five properties.
• Report no debts other than their home mortgage.

See? Just like everyone else.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Google Maps Streetview seems to have discovered a wormhole while driving down Muldoon Road in Anchorage, Alaska (my hometown). Somehow, in all the years of driving up and down this road, I’d never noticed the sudden jump into a residential parking lot and then back onto the road itself. I’m obviously not paying enough attention!

From the “only in Alaska” department…

( Oh, so you think your Humvee is cool, do ya? Do ya, punk? )

For the record, I’m not much of a truck person, and I can’t stand Humvees (or just about any other form of SUV, for that matter), except in the extremely rare instances where there’s a reason to own and drive a beast that huge. Needless to say, your average overpaid suburbanite doesn’t really have a reason.

This truck, though…ya gotta admit, for most people, that’s going to trigger at least some small amount of testosterone. Treads. TREADS! Heh.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

“This is it,” I thought as I huddled under a pile of musty sleeping bags, ratty blankets, and discarded coats in the back of my friend’s mini-van, trying desperately to find some warmth and stop shivering. Despite the warm mid-afternoon August sun pouring through the tinted windows of the van and the weight of layer after layer of material pressing down on me, the tremors continued to wrack my body, and I knew that this time, there was no coming back. I’d gone too far.

I’d spent the past two years dropping acid on a regular basis. One to three times a week, placing the small squares of paper on my tongue, tasting the slightly metallic tang of the chemicals as they leaked out of the hit and into my body, feeling the paper dissolve into a mushy mess in my mouth until I spit it out and waited eagerly for the familiar sensations of an acid trip to take hold. “Seven hits and you’re legally insane,” we’d remind each other as the drug started to take hold, laughing as we tried to calculate just how many times we’d tripped and how many hits we’d taken. Soon our nerves would jack into overdrive: each touch a new experience, sending us questing for the perfect texture; sounds would sharpen, gaining depth and dimensionality undreamt of on more sober days; colors brightening, shimmering and dancing before our eyes; and sometimes — though less often for me than for some of my friends — our minds, unsatisfied with the paltry sensory input we were providing, would start to invent their own and the hallucinations would kick in.

This time, though, it wasn’t fun. Instead of acid, my usual drug of choice, I’d instead embarked on an altogether different trip — the ticket this time being a full eighth of the dry, foul-tasting fungus known colloquially as ‘shrooms. Curled in the fetal position in my improvised shelter, hearing the muffled sounds of friends and strangers laughing and partying outside the van, I knew that this had been a mistake, and feared that it was one for which I would be paying for the rest of my life.

My friends and I were at Alaska’s annual Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival, an event that, for many people, has more to do with round-the-clock partying and indulging in intoxicants both legal and illegal than it does with folk music. Two hours’ drive north of Anchorage in Katie’s borrowed mini-van, surrounded by the tall fragrant evergreens and birch trees of the Alaskan wilderness, a large parcel of land had been plowed into the festival arena. Beyond a gate made secure more by the Hell’s Angels standing on either side than by the orange plastic security fencing stretched across simple wooden poles was the official festival area: a large stage in front of a trampled dirt field, with gaily colored booths set up around the perimeter to hawk everything from gauzy handmade faerie wings to glassware pipes (conspicuously missing the “For Tobacco Use Only” signs so prominent when sold at smoke shops in the city) to plump, succulent sausages.

This area was dwarfed, however, by the campground: seven football field sized swaths carved out of the surrounding forest containing thousands of cars and enough people to make the festival the third largest community in the state of Alaska for this one weekend each year. Dust-coated sports cars, SUVs, station wagons, mini-vans and full-size campers competed for space with tents, blue tarps, and all manner of improvised camp sites. Leather-clad Hell’s Angels would roar through on ATVs, barking at campers to move their sites this way and that so that more cars could inch their way through the narrow, muddy lanes, made all the more impassable as each new carload of people emptied and and began wandering throughout the site. Campfire smoke would mix with the sweet smell of marijuana, one campsite’s techno would battle with another campsite’s Metallica, and with nightfall, sudden explosions of sound and color appeared as fireworks flew randomly above and about the campgrounds. In short, chaos — made all the more incredible when experienced from far outside the rational norms of sobriety.

Since LSD takes a couple days to work its way out of the body, and Friday had been an experiment with “day-tripping” (an unusual experience for me, as I generally preferred to spend my acid trips in dimmer light — a ‘cockroach,’ according to my friends), dropping another hit or two of acid wasn’t an option. So, when an acquaintance sauntered by our campsite and mentioned that he had some mushrooms available for interested parties, it didn’t take me long to decide to give them a try. I had tried mushrooms twice before, neither time with much success, merely getting mildly irritated and going to bed. “Well, if a sixteenth didn’t do much for you,” advised Chad, “try an eighth.” As these things so often do, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Money changed hands, and I was handed a plastic baggie with four rather unimpressive looking shriveled brown mushrooms inside. I sniffed them and made a face. “Man, these things smell like shit!”

“They should,” laughed my source. “They’re grown in it!”

Knowing I wouldn’t be able to stomach just popping the foul little things into my mouth — I’m not fond of eating normal mushrooms, let alone mushrooms that so pungently betray their origin — I dug into our food supplies, poured a large bowl of applesauce, and crumbled the ‘shrooms into the bowl. Picking up a spoon, I put the first bite into my mouth — and discovered to my dismay that the tart sweetness of the applesauce hardly disguised the foul taste of the fungus at all. In fact, not only did the concoction still taste foul, but the mushroom pieces had become quite unpleasantly moist, sliding down my throat like slightly spoiled oysters. Still, I was determined to give ‘shrooming one last attempt, and I managed to work my way through the bowl.

Three hours later, and I was regretting my decision unlike any other I’d made to that point. While the initial sensations had been not entirely unlike those of an acid trip, things soon took on new and uncomfortable tones. Even though the late summer sun was still shining down on us, I kept getting colder and colder. Sounds became more and more disjointed, leaving voices and music muffled until they grew close and suddenly exploded into full volume within my head. I soon retreated into the back of the van in an attempt to gain a little more control over my surroundings. The sensations continued to increase, however, forcing me to close the back gate of the van and crank every window shut so that as little sound as possible would leak in. After a few minutes of digging through bags I had every piece of fabric I could find wrapped around me. Still, I could feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into the effects of the drug — and for the first time in my years of drug use, I was scared.

Unable to do more than huddle in a ball and let the drug run its course, I listened to the sounds of the festivities outside. “Is he okay?” I heard someone ask. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t unclench the aching muscles of my jaw in order to say anything, and soon I heard their voice fade away after they gained friendly reassurances from my campmates. “He just needs to be left alone for a bit,” I heard, and I felt my fingernails cut into my palms as another spasm of shivers ran through my body. To be alone was the last thing I needed right then, but there was no way for me to let them know. All I could do was lie there, wait, and hope that there was going to be an end to this.

Four hours later, it slowly dawned on me that I hadn’t actually felt things getting worse in a little while. Cautiously, I unclenched my fists and moved some of the pile aside, pushing myself up to lean against the wall of the van. The sun, on its long journey toward setting, was peeking between the trees, sending stripes of shadow across the windows. As one enthusiastic campsite a few cars down sent an early roman candle shooting blue and red balls of flame into the air, I realized that the shivers had stopped. I wasn’t anywhere near sober, but I had peaked. I’d made it through the worst of the trip, and had finally started the long, slow process of coming down.

As I pushed the back gate of the van up, the outside world seemed to pour back into my shelter. Music, conversation and smoke drifted in. Chad looked up from the stick he held over our campfire, and a little bit of marshmallow dripped down and sizzled on the glowing coals. “Hey. You okay?” I nodded. I would be okay, or at least I was pretty sure I would be, and that was close enough. After a short pause, Chad nodded back, then turned back to blow out his marshmallow and add its gooey white stickiness to the in-progress S’more in his hand.

For the rest of the night, I sat in the van, watching people walk by outside, listening to the random snippets of conversation and music, and occasionally exploring our food reserves for tastes and textures that I could handle. Letting the rhythms of the ongoing party outside wash over me, I turned my thoughts inward, prying open all the musty mental boxes and psychological cubbyholes that I’d constructed over the past few years, pulling out the contents, shaking the dust off, and investigating whatever I uncovered. As rain started to fall and passersby slogged through the muck of the suddenly soggy campsites, I slogged through the muck in my mind, facing demons I had hidden from during the years of self-medicating my way out of having to cope with the world around me.

As the morning sun broke over the treetops, I stepped out into the crisp morning air and found Chad and Katie. “It’s time to go home.” They nodded, Chad grabbed the keys and took the driver’s seat, and we slowly worked our way back out to the highway. While Katie slept in the back, Chad and I talked about my night. “I’m done,” I told him. “It’s been a fun couple of years, but it’s time for me to start facing things again.” We fell silent as Chad drove, and I watched the light flicker through the trees and the gentle curves of the road unfurl before us as we continued into Anchorage, the rising sun at our backs, and a chemical-free life before me.

---

Paper number three for ENG101. On the one hand, as this was a ‘personal narrative’ essay, it was right up my alley — not only is it one of my favorite forms of writing (purely creative), but after the number of years I’ve spent babbling on this website, it’s one I have a lot of practice with. The downside, though, was picking a topic — after the number of years I’ve spent babbling on this website, I had to find something I hadn’t rambled on about already! Eventually, I settled on a story I’ve been meaning to tell for some time now: the last time I did any sort of illegal narcotics.

In the end, I got a perfect 4.0/100%, and JC asked for permission to hold onto a copy of the paper to use as an example of good writing in future classes.

Yay for drugs!

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

Back in the mid- to late-‘90’s, Anchorage used to have a fairly active skinhead community. I can’t say how they might have compared to similar groups in other cities, but as far as Anchorage went, they were well-known, and fairly “hard core.”

For a long time, I didn’t have a whole lot of contact with them. I’d see them around town every so often, but usually, that was about it.

A few years before, back in high school, a girl I knew was dating one of the leaders of the skinhead scene and I ended up having a couple chances to talk to him, as well as another skinhead a few years later at a party. Those conversations ended up being a lot more interesting than I expected them to be, too, as these guys weren’t your typical skinheads. They’d each gotten into it when they were younger for all the usual reasons that kids are drawn into any sort of gang culture: power, community, a sense of belonging, friends. For people like these guys, the racism aspect of the typical skinhead persona had little to do with why they joined.

In the case of the second guy, who I spent time talking with at a party, he never really developed the racist bent that so many others in the scene did, and instead delved more and more into the roots of the skinhead and nazi movements. Eventually, while he still carried the look and general presence of your typical skinhead, he ended up approaching it not as a reason or excuse to denigrate other races, but simply his way of recognizing the history and background of where he came from. He had pride in his family and his personal history, but he wasn’t racist at all — in fact, his girlfriend was a beautiful asian girl.

I wasn’t entirely sure why he chose to continue to wear the uniform, as there is certainly a very strong (and often not undeserved) stereotype associated with the skinhead look, and for whatever reason, he didn’t run with the SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Predjudice), but that was his choice. In any case, it was a very interesting discussion — while the skinhead stereotype generally tends to include double-digit IQs, some of them are amazingly intelligent. It’s how they choose to apply that intelligence that can make all the difference between whether they’re interesting or frightening (for a good example of the latter, see American History X).

Of course, all too often, people like that are the exception, and I ended up having a couple of memorable run-ins with the Anchorage skinhead crowd.

One night, I and a couple of friends were hanging out at VINL (Village Inn, Northern Lights), our general place to go when we didn’t want to be at home, but didn’t have anything better to do. We had a booth along the outside wall of the smoking section, and had been there for around an hour or so.

About five tables away from us were four of the local skins. We didn’t pay much attention to them at first — either letting sleeping dogs lie or wrapping towels around our head, pick your mental image — but after a while, it was obvious that they were paying attention to us. Glances were shot our direction, and the occasional muttered “faggots” would drift our way.

To this day, I have no idea what caught their attention, or why we became the subjects of their ire. The only even semi-reasonable prospect I’ve ever come up with was that I was wearing a shirt for the band Black Happy — but that explanation seems a little far-fetched even for me to count as probable. Whatever it was, though, when they stood up from their table, rather than leaving, they came over to us. Three of them stood at the end of the table, blocking us in, while the leader of the group sat down next to me.

I don’t have a really clear memory of the next few minutes. The goons were standing mute, while the leader spent a good five minutes spouting off, giving us a good long spiel, about how we should be proud of our race, stand up for our fatherland, and so on. The usual jingoistic propaganda that you tend to hear from either skins or Karl Rove.

We just sat and listened, saying as little as possible. In my head, though, I was going off on the guy — and as I’d just spent the previous summer in Germany, I had a whole spiel ready to go in German. Never opened my mouth, of course, as antagonizing the guy didn’t seem like the brightest approach…but it was brilliant stuff, I tell you.

At one point during his diatribe, one of the other three went out to the parking lot, got their car, and drove it around until it was parked directly in front of the window we were sitting by. He then switched over to the passenger seat and got something out of the glove compartment. I don’t know what it was, but he was being very careful to keep it down and out of sight. Draw your own conclusions.

Eventually, things wound down. The guy stood back up, tossed a few last verbal threats our direction, and then they went out to join their friend in the car. They didn’t leave, though. At first, they just sat in the car, talking and watching us. After a little while, they drove off, only to circle the block and come back to park in the parking lot again. This went on for about another half hour, until they finally left.

More than a little shaken, we stayed put for another hour or so until we were pretty sure that they were actually gone, and then went home.

Later in the year, I talked my way into my first public DJing gig. A new all-ages club, City Lights, had opened up in town, catering primarily to the top-40/hip-hop crowd. I started by just dropping by every so often with a couple friends to check things out, and struck up a conversation with the bartender. After a few visits, she got me in touch with the guys running the place, and I managed to convince them that there was a fairly large untapped market in the local alternative community, and eventually they agreed to give us a chance.

Things went well for a couple months, and then one night about an hour after we opened, who should come in but the four skins that had harassed my friends and I — only this time, they were accompanied by the leader of the local skinhead community. I wasn’t terribly sure what to make of this, but they didn’t look like they were out to cause any trouble, and they just walked to an open table against the back wall of the club and sat down to watch.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the leader walked up, with the guy who had been the primary antagonist at VINL trailing behind him. “Hey — can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said, and cued up a slightly longer song.

“Look — the guys told me what went down a while ago. They want to say they’re sorry,” he said, and gestured over his shoulder at the guy behind him, who was studiously avoiding looking at me, preferring to scan the crowd on the dance floor.

“Oh,” I said, more than a little unsure how to proceed from here. “Um…okay.”

“Eehh, don’t worry about it,” he went on. “They were a little drunk, just blowing off some steam — nothing serious.” I just nodded — I wasn’t entirely sure I bought the explanation, but I wasn’t going to start arguing, either. “Look, we were wondering if you could play a few tracks for us,” and he held out a stack of three CDs.

“Um…well, yeah, sure,” I said, and took the CDs. “Why not?”

They went back to their table, and a few songs later, I tossed in the songs they had marked. All three songs were really high-energy, aggro skinhead punk. The skins moved onto the dancefloor (which cleared out rather quickly), and spent the next few minutes lightly pounding each other in a quick high-speed mini-mosh. The songs ended, and as I put something else on, four of them went back to their table while the leader came back up to the DJ booth to get the CDs.

“Thanks a lot, man,” he said as I handed him the CDs. “No hard feelings, right?”

“Sure, no hard feelings,” and I shook his hand.

“Good. Look, you ever run into any trouble, or need a hand or something — get ahold of us. You’re a good guy.”

“I appreciate that.”

And back he went to the table.

I never had to take him up on his offer, but from then on, anytime I ran into him around town, we’d say hi and chat for a few minutes. He and his boys occasionally showed up at the club, but never had me play anything for them again. They’d just walk in, grab a table, hang out and chat with each other for a while, then leave, never causing any problems. And for a year or two, if I’d needed it, I could have had the skins at my back.

It’s a weird little world I live in sometimes.

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

News from Oregon of a [practical joke gone wrong][1]…

[1]: http://www.local6.com/news/4002826/detail.html “Pranksters Arrested After Staging Fake Murder to Scare Friend

A couple of guys in Oregon who started drinking early in the morning thought it would be funny to stage a murder scene.

But by the end of the day, they weren’t laughing. They were jailed and so was their friend, the subject of the prank.

An alarmed Daniel Maerz told police he walked into the house and found 31-year-old Adam Vickers dead from a gunshot wound. He believed his friend had been killed by his roommate, Kyle Wisdom. After his emergency call, police rushed to the scene, ordering a lockdown of a nearby elementary school on their way.

But after realizing their house was surrounded by police, Vickers and the roommate decided they’d better go outside and explain it was all a joke intended to scare Maerz.

Vickers and Wisdom were jailed on charges including initiating a false report.

Maerz was also arrested, on a charge of methamphetamine possession. But police said he was happy to learn his friend wasn’t dead, even though he was upset with his friends for pulling the prank.

This reminded me of a couple stories I was told by a teacher I knew in high school — he wasn’t one of my teachers, but he was friends with another friend of mine, so we hung out a few times. The man had a somewhat odd sense of humor and a fondness for pranks, which landed him in trouble from time to time — and to be honest, I’m somewhat surprised he never got himself fired.

There were two stories he told us that I still remember (names have been changed, of course).

The first was actually somewhat similar to the above reported story. The teacher was a science teacher, so there was an auxiliary room attached to the classroom used for holding supplies.

One day he invited one of the students in to help him get some supplies, and then once they were in the room, he quickly explained what he had in mind. The two of them immediately started staging a huge ruckus, yelling at each other, banging on things, and generally making sure to get the attention of as many of the kids in the classroom as possible. After a few minutes, things got really quiet, as the student stretched out on the floor and the teacher doused him with some fake blood.

Unfortunately, when he opened the door, expecting to shock the group of students gathered around…it was the school’s principal of security who was the first to greet him.

Obviously, this didn’t go over very well. This wasn’t the worst unexpected outcome he told us about, though.

During one of his classes, he had a student that was apparently completely unable to stay awake during class. Whether she’d been out partying too late the night before, or just hadn’t had enough sleep, or just didn’t care enough to pay attention, he kept seeing her nod off. After seeing her head droop one too many times, he stopped the class for a moment and asked to talk to her.

“Look, Rachel, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m tired of seeing you falling asleep, and I don’t want you to do it again. But I want to make sure the other kids pay attention too…so we’re going to have some fun with this.

“After you go back to your seat, wait a few minutes, then start to nod off again. I’ll throw a fit, threaten you with detention, and you’ll promise not to do it again. Wait a few minutes, then start to droop one more time. This time, I’ll make sure none of the other kids are watching, come over, and pretend to slap you across the face to wake you up. We’ll have some fun, freak the other kids out — and then I want you to pay attention from now on, okay?”

She agreed, and went back to her seat.

A few minutes later, her head started to droop. Mr. Nolan immediately blew up. “Rachel! Dammit, I’ve told you too many times, I want you awake for my class! Now if you can’t stay awake and pay attention, I don’t want you here, and I’ll flunk you out. Do you understand me?”

Rachel nodded, and they went back to their lesson…for a few minutes.

Sure enough, not much later, she was nodding off again behind her book, and Mr. Nolan went nuts. He slammed his book down on the desk. “God_dammit_! Everyone! Page 356, now. Heads in your books, and I don’t want to see any of you looking at anything else.” As the kids scrambled to find the right page in their books, he stalked across the room to Rachel. “Look, I’ve told you before — Richard, eyes in your book, now — you’re in my class to learn, not to sleep. This is my classroom, and you will do as you’re told!” With that, he slapped his hands together, and Rachel went tumbling off her chair and onto the floor.

The classroom went dead.

Mr. Nolan turned and stalked back to the front of the room. All eyes were on Rachel as she shook herself off, got up off the floor, and sat back down in her chair. Mr. Nolan reached the front of the room, turned back around, and glared across the class room.

“Well, Rachel? Have you learned anything today?”

Rachel sat straight up in her chair, and looked her teacher dead in the eye.

“Yes, Mr. Nolan.

“Pain turns me on — do it again!”

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

My parents gave me my first car, in my family’s usual style. For my birthday that year, mom and dad handed me a wrapped present, about the size of a shoebox. I unwrapped it to discover the expected shoebox, took off the top — and found a stuffed bunny with its eyes X-ed out with yarn.

A little confused, I raised my eyebrows. “A dead bunny?”

“Close. A dead rabbit.” And dad handed me the keys to his 1981 VW Diesel Rabbit, currently parked out on the street awaiting brake repairs.

I loved that car. I’d learned to drive in my friend Rod’s VW Cabriolet — basically a convertible Rabbit — so I was quite comfortable behind the wheel of that little car. Bright yellow, five-speed manual transmission, a sunroof — and diesel powered, which at that point, was truly a beautiful thing. No emissions tests to worry about, no spark plugs to struggle with, and gasoline was under a dollar a gallon back then.

Now, being a diesel, speed was not high on the list of features on this car. I think the best I ever managed to coax it was around 85 mph, heading downhill (the big run down into Eagle River from Anchorage, just before you cross over the bridge, for all you Anchorage-area readers) with a tailwind. Realistically, this was probably a good thing, as I really enjoy driving, and if there’s a good song on the stereo…well, having a fairly low top speed probably saved me a few tickets over the years.

However, as fun as high speed can be, it’s often no real contest against someone who knows how to drive and how to handle their car in various road conditions.

One winter day, I was sitting at a stoplight in Anchorage, heading down Northern Lights Boulevard towards the airport, when a guy and his girlfriend pulled up beside me in some fancy little go-faster. I looked over, and apparently he took my glance as a challenge, as he looked somewhat disdainfully at my little Rabbit, and lightly gunned his engine.

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.

So I gunned mine. He revved his engine up, and I did the same. After a moment, the light changed, he stomped on the gas — and went absolutely nowhere as his tires spun wildly on the icy street. Meanwhile, I lightly touched the gas and pulled forward, handily making it through the light before he had even managed to coax his little sports car into movement.

He caught up just in time for us to hit the next stoplight, and he started revving his engine again. I laughed — once wasn’t enough?

Apparently not. My little Rabbit beat him off the line three stoplights in a row. He was getting more aggravated with each attempt, and I was getting more and more amused.

Eventually, we made it to the intersection of Northern Lights and Minnesota. This being a more major intersection in Anchorage, the streets weren’t quite as icy, and by now he’d actually started to figure out what he was doing wrong. We sat at the intersection, watching traffic move by in front of us, each of us occasionally glancing over to the other car.

The crosswalk light switched from “WALK” and started blinking “DON’T WALK”. Engines revved up a bit.

“DON’T WALK” turned solid, and the traffic light on Minnesota went yellow.

Red light. Engines were gunned — this was it.

Green.

He pulled out, this time keeping control and starting slowly, letting his tires gain traction. I did the same, pacing him for the first half block, then starting to fall behind as his more powerful car started to gain speed. At the end of the first block, as he started to pull noticeably ahead of me, we hit the crest of a hill — and while he let his car leap forward, using the downhill slope to give him one last advantage, I tapped my breaks, let myself fall behind him, and watched his car go flying down the hill.

And a few minutes later, I gave him a jaunty wave as I passed by him one last time. I must say, those pretty little white sports cars do reflect the red-and-blue lights of the police cruisers quite nicely as they sit by the side of the road, waiting for the officer to write out their speeding ticket.

(This was inspired by The wrath of the Evil Elle~Noir.)

Originally published at eclecticism. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been thinking about the weddings I’ve been at or involved in lately — James and Stacey’s last month, Casey’s tomorrow, and possibly two scheduled for next summer. It got me thinking back to one of my favorite weddings that I’ve been part of — which, unfortunately, led to more problems than I ever wanted to have to deal with.

It was all about Travis and Lana…

This all happened quite a few years ago. Let’s see…I was DJ’ing at the Lost Abbey, and living in a condo behind East High School in Anchorage that I’d rented with my girlfriend Becca (though she had left me to live with someone she’d had an affair with at this point), which would put it around ‘95 or so. I’d known both Travis and Lana for quite a while, Travis from the clubs and around town, and Lana — well, Lana I first met when she was dating my little brother. While I wouldn’t have put either of them in my ‘close friend’ category, I thought I knew them fairly well, and that we were decent friends. Little did I know….

Anyway, Travis and Lana met, dated, and after a while, decided to get married. Being a couple of club kids, though, they were determined to make their marriage something (ahem) ‘special’. That they did — and, even given the problems that followed, I still have very fond memories of that particular wedding.

The wedding was held at the Lost Abby, on a Saturday night, right at midnight. This was back before the Abby started on its self-destructive spiral downwards, so we were getting a lot of people in there every weekend — and midnight on a Saturday night was not exactly a sparse hour for the club. I think part of the motivation was to get as many people there as possible, whether or not they knew them — but I think they also knew that when dealing with a lot of kids ranging from 14 to their mid-20’s, many of which were carless, this was the best possible way for them to have all their friends at their wedding.

Their ceremony was a thing of beauty — in a twisted, dark, pesudo-gothic sort of way. They got their friend Ben to perform the vows, and just before midnight, I finished the song that was playing and asked everyone on the dance floor to open up a space in the middle, and then explained to them what I’d been told the ceremony was going to be. Travis, Lana, and Ben took their spots in a triangle in the cleared space in the middle of the dance floor, and when they were ready I started playing Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod”, an eight minute-long high-speed industrial noisefest. As they recited their vows, the entire assembled masses moshed in a circle around them for the length of the song. Once the song and their vows were over, they’d given me free reign to follow up with a song of my choosing — so, given both my sense of humor and the spirit of the event, I chose “Love American Style” by X-Calibur, featuring the lyrics, “Being in love really sucks / being in love really sucks / a kiss and a hug and a couple of fucks / being in love really sucks / babies cost a lot of money / please don’t make me fuck you honey.” What can I say? They loved it!

So that was the wedding — one that I’m not likely to forget anytime soon. One of the most bizarre I’ve ever been around, but a lot of fun, and greatly enjoyed by all involved, even those that showed up at the club with no prior knowledge of a wedding that night! Cool stuff.

But, of course, all good things must come to an end.

Not too long after the wedding, Travis and Lana came knocking at the door to my condo. They were struggling a bit, and needed a place to stay for a week or so while they found their own place. Sure, no problem — I’m always willing to do what I can to help out my friends, and have a tendency to be trusting (sometimes possibly to the point of being naïve, something dad and I have talked about in the past as being a trait we share), so the two of them moved into my living room for a week or so.

A few weeks after that, they were still looking. I’d gotten a bit tired of having them in the living room, so I let Travis and Lana set up shop in the second bedroom. Things were fine that way for a while. Then…well, you never seem to see things heading downhill when you first start treading that slippery slope, do you? As I said, I like helping people out when I can…and suddenly, there were all these people that Travis knew, or met at the club, who needed a place to crash for a night here, a night there, a couple days every so often. The first wasn’t a problem…the second wasn’t a problem…but they just kept coming. The road to hell being paved with good intentions, it all seemed okay at the time.

Even I can only pull the wool over my own eyes for so long. After a while, it was a little too obvious that in addition to the number of people going through my house, there were a lot of other things working their way through. What amazes me today is that it took me so long to hit my breaking point. The drug trafficking I could cope with most of the time — usually, it was restricted to what at the time were the ‘big three’ drugs of the Alaska counterculture scene: pot, acid, and ‘shrooms. I did find it necessary to mention to Travis that I was less than thrilled when I caught word of a little cocaine having passed through at one point, though to my knowledge, that was a one-time thing. Turning a blind eye to the car stereos that would occasionally appear and disappear was probably not the best thing for me to do, though those are so easy to move that there most likely wasn’t much I could do about them.

I did throw a minor fit, however, when one day I sat down on the couch and felt something hard poking me. I reached down between the cushions, figuring there was probably a remote or something shoved down there — and pulled out a rifle, holding it by its muzzle. Even better — the fool thing was loaded. Had that trigger caught on anything…well, seeing as how I’d just sat on the ‘business’ end of the rifle, I don’t want to think about exactly what portions of my anatomy had just been endangered. Even then, however, that wasn’t enough for me to put my foot down…saying ‘no’ is something I’ve since worked on, but at the time, didn’t happen nearly enough.

The last straw, when it finally happened, was a doozy, though. It happened on a Sunday morning — I’d spun at the Abby that Saturday night, and we had the usual (at that point) post-club bodies littering the condo. I don’t know what time it was — probably not as early as it felt, but I’ve never functioned very well in the mornings, and when you’re up ‘til 4am DJ’ing, “morning” is a very relative term. In any case, I was woken up by the sound of repeated pounding on the front door. It went on long enough to convince me that it was probably something important, so I worked my way out of bed and made my way downstairs. As I scanned the living room, I realized that I could probably only come up with names for about 5 of the 10 or so people scattered across the floor.

As I opened the front door, it became all too apparent just why the pounding hadn’t stopped, as I was greeted by the none-too-friendly faces of two Anchorage Police Department officers flanking Mike — a friend of Travis’s that had had a falling out with Travis a week or two earlier. They asked if they could come in and as I didn’t know of anything illegal on the premises (at that particular point in time), I said sure. They were somewhat surprised by the number of people gathered in the living room, and had me go through and wake up those that hadn’t already been awakened by this point so that they could do an ID check of everyone on the premises. I still wasn’t too sure what all this was about, but Mike cleared that up rather quickly when he went to the back sliding door, opened it and took the officers to the carport stall where Travis had parked a VW Minibus earlier that weekend.

As it turns out, that Minibus was actually Mike’s. Travis claimed that he had bought it for Mike, but that as Mike had not repayed Travis the money for the van (a staggering $50, if I remember correctly), he had taken it upon himself to ‘repossess’ the vehicle. In essence, I found myself in the unenviable position of harboring a stolen vehicle in my carport — and as the sole leaseholder on the condo, it was my legal responsibility. I, of course, wanted nothing to do with it — I had my own car already, and had no need for a stolen VW Minibus (that, incidentally, Travis had apparently spent much of the previous day attempting to disguise by spray-painting the bus a different color — a fact not lost on either Mike or the police officers, which didn’t do much to bolster Travis’s claim that the van was actually his). I turned the van over to Mike, and the officers discovered that in addition to the current brouhaha, there was an outstanding warrant for Travis’s arrest for unpaid traffic tickets.

I decided at this point that I’d had more than I could take, and while Travis was sitting next to me, handcuffed and waiting for the officers to take him downtown after they finished the ID checks on the rest of the assembled riffraff, I called my landlords and gave them my one month notice of intent to leave.

The next month turned into a very interesting one. Travis ended up being bailed out the next day, and within the next week came through the house while I was at work and cleaned out all of his and Lana’s possessions — along with a fair amount of mine, some of which I discovered immediately, some that I didn’t realize I was missing until long afterward, almost none of which was ever recovered. Once I went in to clean out the room that Travis and Lana had been inhabiting, I found that they had done a fair amount of damage, from (apparently forcibly) removing the blinds from the windows to staining the walls with soot from cheap candles and incense. There were knife marks in the banister from where Travis had decided to practice his knife throwing, and down in the kitchen, much of the molding had been broken off of the counter top when Travis had climbed up onto the counters to place things on top of the kitchen cabinets. All in all, far more damage than my security deposit was going to cover.

So, I did what I could to clean up, salvaged everything I could, and left. It was definitely a learning experience — and was a major motivating force in my finally learning that no matter how much I like to help people out, there does come a time when I have to think of myself and my welfare first and say “no” to a request for help. I’m also much better at determining when a given situation is starting to progress beyond the bonds of where I’m comfortable, and actually saying something about it, rather than just continuing to plod along, hoping that things will change. It’s a shame that it took this severe of a kick in the ass to get me to realize that, but, at the same time — I could have learned this particular lesson much later, or never at all.

A silver lining to every cloud, eh?

In any case, that’s the long and sordid tale of myself, Travis, and Lana — one of the coolest weddings I’ve ever witnessed, and one of the most bizarre (and, looking back on it, quite possibly dangerous) instances of my trust being abused that I’ve ever gone through. I’ve not heard much of either Travis or Lana over the years since then — the occasional random rumor floats through the rumor mill, but not much more than that. I’m fairly sure that they ended up getting divorced a couple years after all this happened, and I’ve heard rumors connected with Travis ranging from his bailing to Alaska for parts unknown to having contracted AIDS. What the truth is, I’ll probably never know — and, to be quite honest, I think I’m happier that way.

Ah, well — ya live, ya learn, so it goes, c’est la vie, que sera sera, and innumerable other cliches.

I’m still here, and in my world — that’s what counts.