I've been walking to work along the Burke-Gilman trail for over twenty years now. (Eventually I'll get there!) Over the years I've tried several times to remember where it was that a certain old friend of mine used to live back in, oh, 1986 or so. It was an apartment with a balcony just up the hill from Lake Union, and we had some crazy good times ( Read more... )

Recently I wrote about the movie The Kids Are All Right and tried to argue that it was a new kind of story because it presented a new kind of character in the sperm donor. (The lesbian spouses/mothers are also arguably a new character type leading to new story types.) I was talking about the movie with my neighbors on Saturday, and E told me she ( Read more... )

This movie made me sad, and not just because it's a sad biopic about a young girl from a dysfunctional family who was chewed up and spat out by the music industry. It made me sad because it reminded me of my best friend in junior high and high school, Reid, who wore platform shoes and colored sunglasses and ostentatious rings and did his best to ( Read more... )

I don't remember how old I was when my paternal grandmother gave me the dog-shaped pillow, but I was old enough that I felt embarrassed by it. It was an abstract dog shape, a flat design, with a square body and a little square for a head, with plastic eyes on both sides, and a littler square for the ears and two squares representing the front and ( Read more... )

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The wave of reminiscence about the 1969 moon landing has got me thinking about the significant lacunae in my shared experience with even Americans of my own generation. We were on Yap island in Micronesia from the summer of 1966 until the summer of 1970. I was five when we moved out there and nine when we moved back. One thing that means is that I ( Read more... )

So in March 1979 the Carl Combine traveled from Eugene to Seattle for Norwescon. It was my first science fiction convention. Our surrealist spirit guide was Carl-sub-pi, the irrational Carl:


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Last night I realized that this month is the 25th anniversary of my move to Seattle and into this house. I moved here in January 1984. I can't remember what the date was, but it was pretty soon after New Year's, maybe the 4th ( Read more... )

Well, I really should be cleaning the house for Vanguard, but instead I'll use the looming chore as motivation to write ( Read more... )