The Saga of a HELOC

Last year I decided that it was finally time to fix some of the big stuff around the house: the garage roof was leaking, the swimming pool needed retiling, and we’d been operating with no air conditioning upstairs for nearly ten years, and the Smaller Animal—that’s the one with the heart condition, who’s not nearly so “smaller” any more—is prone to overheating.  Of course, things like that require quite a bit of money, but the good news was that we’d been paying off our mortgage for 13 years, so we’d reached the point where the mortgage insurance had dropped off, plus the value of our house was shooting up.  And my credit score had bounced back from all those youthful credit card indiscretions.  All in all, a good time to leverage our equity and get some cash for repairs.

We looked first at refinancing, but we didn’t relish the process and paperwork for getting a whole new mortgage.  I looked at the whole second mortgage thing, but then I found something even better: a HELOC.  That’s a home equity line of credit: meaning, you only borrow the money when you actually need it to pay for something, the equity of the house serves as the collateral, and most are interest-only for the first 10 years or so, then you start paying it off.  In 10 years, we’ll be nearly done paying off the primary mortgage, so it’ll be less onerous to take on another payment.  And, if we get a windfall, we can always pay off the HELOC early.  It’s a pretty good deal, and many financial sites out there recommend it as the way to go.

So I started looking into banks that offered such a thing, and I found a credit union that I liked.  Now, this story is about how the universe hates me, not about how I chose a terrible bank, so I’m not going to name the exact institution.  Besides, as much as this bank fucked up, a lot of it wasn’t their fault, and they also had a number of very helpful employees along the way, so I’m not going to throw them under the bus.  I’ll just say that it happens to be a credit union based in New Jersey.  Which, in this day and age of doing everything online, I figured wouldn’t matter that much.

But of course people in New Jersey tend to work New Jersey hours, and I don’t even work “regular” hours here in sunny Southern California.  I often work late into the night, so I get up late.  My work is fine with that, and if I need to take a break to handle something that simply has to happen during business hours, they’re very understanding.  And, for West Coast businesses, my roughly 4 hours of overlap with what’s considered a normal workday is plenty.

But of course New Jersy is 3 hours behind us, so that 4 hours becomes about an hour, and it’s the first hour of my day, when I’m still waking up and feeling a bit groggy and out-of-sorts.  So it’s not ideal.  But, I figured, as long as I can handle the majority of it via email, I should be good.

And my initial contact, who was the lending equivalent of a salesperson, seemed to get that.  Oh, she kept sending me messages like “when’s a good time to call?” and so forth, but I just ignored that and kept on asking my questions and asking for info via email.  It took me several months to make up my mind, because that’s just the sort of person I am (i.e. I have to analyze every possible choice from every possible angle), but she was patient and never told me to fuck off, and eventually my CFP took a look at the rates and the conditions and said, wow, that’s a pretty good rate, you should jump on that.  So I did.

Now, as it happened, this was right around the holidays at the end of last year.  I returned my completed application on 12/12/23, and was transitioned to a loan processor on 12/21.  By the time Jaunary 2nd rolled around, I was getting emails from a different processor because the first guy had gone on vacation.  On 1/5, I got an email from a third processor, but the very next day the second guy was back.  And of course the first guy eventually came back (that was on 1/16) and tried to take back over, but there was already a good deal of confusion by that point.

See, one of the conditions for the loan was that I had to open a savings account with the bank, with a minimum initial deposit of $5.  And I would get a better rate if I had payments automatically deducted from that account.  Which seemed simple enough: just open an online account.  I’ve done it many times, at many different banks.  Piece of cake, I thought.  Except it wasn’t.

My first attempt failed.  My second attempt failed.  The crew of rotating loan processors advised me to go online and set up a video appointment with the technical support department ... which also failed.  I ended up making 8 attempts on 5 different browsers on 3 different operating systems on 4 different devices (including laptops, desktops, and phones) before I was finally able to get through the account opening process.  I never was able to successfully schedule a tech support appointment, and none of the “advice” from the processors ever worked: it was just trying over and over again until something finally clicked.  All I got from the processors were repeated instructions to do the same things I was already doing that weren’t working, and stern admonitions like this one:

PLEASE NOTE:
Opening a membership account is a member requirement on this process.

To which I responded, yeah, I know that.  That’s what I’m trying to do.  And what eventually worked was Microsoft Edge on a Windows machine, which is ... just, no.  There’s no way I was going to borrow The Mother‘s laptop and use Edge every time I had to do anything with the bank.  At this point, my whole impression of the bank’s technical capabilities was plummeting.  But I had two bigger problems.

First of all, the loan processor was threatening to close my application, because it’s only good for a certain number of days.  I kept pointing out to him that none of the problems I was having were my fault, so it was kind of on them to extend the loan.  Which didn’t fly.  So I had to CC my salesperson and get her to step in, which she did and the deadline was extended.

But the biggest problem was, they wouldn’t open the account without putting in the $5.  Which is fairly unusual: the normal way online banks do it is, you open the account, then you have 30 days (or whatever) to make the initial deposit, or it just gets closed automatically.  But this wouldn’t even let me finish the account opening process without the 5 bucks.  Fine, I said; how do I add that?  There was exactly one option: I had to go through a bunch of hoops, give them all the same info I’d already given in the loan application, including yet another picture of my driver’s license, and then I had to send them a selfie (WTF??), and then I just needed to enter the login and password for my main bank account.

And that’s where I shut it down.  I’m not giving out my frigging password to my primary bank account.  I just met you! no way I trust you enough to give you the most sensitive password I own (and especially not over Edge ... sheesh).  So I emailed them back and said, nunh-unh, try again.  So my salesperson stepped in (again) and got the something-something department to open the account manually, waiving the $5 minimum, so then I had routing and account numbers to add to my main bank, so I could transfer the $5 that way.

As you probably know, the way these online accounts verify each other is to make little deposits called “trial deposits”: there’s two or three of them, they’re less than a dollar each, and then they withdraw them back at the end.  You verify the bank by entering the amount of the trial depsoits, which proves you have access to the target bank account.  And, now that the account was officially open, I could use the credit union’s mobile app, so I did have access to the target account.  So may main bank did the trial deposits, but, when I went to verify them, they had cancelled the account.  So I had to call them, and they said the transfers were rejected from the credit union side.  So I passed that along, at which point my salesperson proved to be the hero yet again: she instructed the loan processor to mark the application complete (despite the fact that my account was in a bit of a limbo state, not having received the minimum intial deposit), then she tried to call me to explain what I needed to do, which of course took a few days before we could connect, and in the meantime I started receiving insistent emails from a closing agent.  And I understand that she was just trying to do her job and close things out in a timely manner, but at that point I still didn’t understand how I was going to get a measly $5 into this new account, much less how I was going to be able to get a regular monthly payment into it, so I wasn’t quite ready to sign a bunch of leagl docs yet.  We’re up to February by this point.

Over the phone, my salesperson told me that the reason the trial deposits were rejected was because they weren’t the minimum $5 initial deposit.  I’m not sure this entirely made sense, since I could see the trial deposits in the phone app, so it seemed like they weren’t really rejected, but whatever.  My salesperson advised me to write myself a paper check for the $5 and use the mobile app to deposit it.  Which seemed a bit ... circuitous, but I just wanted to get the whole thing wrapped up, so I just did that.  And my loan closed on 2/22.  Now, this particular HELOC had a condition that I needed to pull out at least $25,000 on closing (that’s what they call the “initial draw”), and that I had to not pay any of that back for the first year.  This was another discount to my interest rate, and my CFP approved it, and I needed nearly that much to cover the upstairs A/C and the garage roof, which were the two things we planned to do immediately anyway.  So that was fine, and the initial $25k was deposited to my fresh, new credit union account on 2/27.  Story over, right?

Nope.

Because I didn’t realize that “do you want us to FedEx you a check or just deposit the initial draw into your savings account?” was a trick question.  In hindsight, if I’d only taken the check ...  But I thought to myself that the online banking troubles were surely over by now, and it would be easy to get the money moved electronically from the credit union back to my main bank, or in the worst case to my other online bank (I use that one because it has a higher interest rate on savings).  How young and foolish I was then.

First I set up both my main bank and my high-interest account bank as targets for transfers in the credit union.  This worked perfectly ... except that, apparently, while doing electronic transfers into the credit union account was fine, doing transfers out of it was not possible.  Like, it just wouldn’t show the external accounts as an option to tranfer to, only to transfer from.  So I figured I’d just add the credit union as an account for tranfser in my high-interest account.  Which also worked perfectly, except for the fact that they have a $2,000/day limit, and a $10,000/month limit.  Shit.  At this point the HVAC repariman and the roofer were botgh scheduled, so I started transferring $2k per day, and then set about trying to figure out how to get to the rest.

I tried to set up the credit union account again at my main bank.  It was rejected before I even got past the first page.  I called them; they told me that the credit union account didn’t allow ACH transfers (which I pointed out was patently false, due to the several currently ongoing transfers to the high-interest account), and then they told me that I’d have to talk to their external accounts department (who of course had gone for the day), and then eventually they told me that I had to stop asking them about it or else my account might get flagged for fraud.  (Personally, I’m convinced that they’re just pissed off that they never got their 67¢ from the trial deposits back.  I offered to cover it for them, but they didn’t buy it.)

So I called the credit union (during my one hour overlap) who suggested that I use “shared branching.” This is a system whereby credit unions all over the country have reciprocal arrangement where you can go to a credit union near you, even though it’s not the same institution, and use it as a branch.  Excellent.  There’s exactly one shared branch in my city, so I went there, only to discover that they had a $1k/day limit.  Well, $1k/day in cash and $1k/day in check form.  So they advised me to try another shared branch, which was an entirely different credit union, but it was 20 minutes away.  I figured, while I’m here, just give me a check for a thousand and a thousand in cash.  I didn’t really want the cash, of course—who wants be carrying around a thousand dollars in cash these days?—but I really wanted to make sure the HVAC guy (who was coming first) would be covered.  But the check they printed for me didn’t have my name correct, because I’m a “Jr,” which is the bane of my existence, and apparently my name was not correct on the credit union account, and the check was automatically printed out based on my account name, so it was made out to my dad.  I pointed out that my main bank was super-picky about the name being correct on checks deposited via the mobile app, so they’d need to cancel it and write a new one.  Except they couldn’t cancel it, because it was a cashier’s check or a certified check or whatever, so they had to redeposit it.  And then they couldn’t write another check because they could only do $1k per day in check form, and they’d already done that.  So now I was up to only 11 thousand, out of the original 25.

So I called the shared branch in the next town over to verify that they would not have any limits; they confimed that, while there was a daily limit on cash, there was no limit on the amount they could give me a check for.  Excellent.  So I drove there.  And their machines were down.  So I had to come back on a different day, which I did.  And they said my account had been flagged for fraud and I had to call the original credit union.  So I did (during my one hour overlap), and they said they’d have to talk to the fraud department, who of course had gone for the day.  So I waited for them to call back and tell me that the fraud hold was lifted, which took a few days, and then I drove to the 20-minutes-away shared branch for a third time, and they told me that the account had been flagged for fraud again.  They theorized that trying to get a single check for roughly $14k was just automatically triggering some fraud threshhold and suggested that I call the source bank.  They’re in New Jersey, I pointed out.  Oh, well, then, they’ll be closed now, they responded.  Yes, I know, I said.

So I called the HELOC credit union again—and, let me tell you, even the most understanding workplace in the world was starting to look askance at me by this point when I said I had some business to attend to, yet again—and asked how I could get my hands on this frigging money that they’d so generously lent me but were making it very hard to get at it even though I was already paying interest on it.  They could do a wire transfer, they suggested, but that would cost money.  Hell, no, I said (honestly, a wire transfer is cheap enough that it probably would have been worth it just to end the torture, but it was starting to be the principle of the thing).  They could mail me a check, they suggested: it’ll only take 7 – 10 business days.  Hey, what about that FedEx option? I asked.  Can’t I still get that?  Well, they said, they could request special dispensation to get the check expedited, but no guarantees.  Fine; I’ll take it (what choice do I have at this point?).  And it was expedited, and it arrived promptly, and I depoisted a check for nearly $14k to my main account on 4/4.  That’s about 38 days post-closing, and countless hours of my time.  Just to actually receive the money I’d already paid a month’s interest on.

We had to postpone the roofer.  But the HVAC fellow came in and did a great job, and luckily he was happy to take that $1,000 in cash off my hands.  And hopefully the roofer will be able to come in a week or so.  And then we can start looking for a pool renovater.  And maybe someone to install an on-demand hot water heater.

So that’s the whole story.  I’m sure you felt like it was a lot to read, but imagine how I feel: I had to live it.  The Mother says I obviously racked up some karmic debt, and whatever I did must’ve been pretty bad, and, who knows? maybe she’s right.  I’d like to think I’m just so lucky in life in general that the universe likes to make sure I don’t get too comfortable.  After all, complaining about how hard it was to get 25 thousand dollars so I could (in part) retile my southern California swimming pool is sort of the definition of “first-world problem.” Still, I thought you might enjoy this comedy of errors, so at least, perhaps, my misery has brought you some joy.  Enjoy the schadenfreude.

I'm drownin' ovah hyeah ...

Today I’ve spent all day recovering from my water pillow springing what might be generously described as “a leak.” So I’ve had to disassemble the whole bed, wash everything that’s washable, bin everything that’s hopeless, and drag the mattress out to sit in the sun.  After dealing with that all day, I’ve got nothing left in me to devote to a blog post.  Hopefully next week.

Here's My Beard ... Ain't It Weird?

I grew my first beard at 17 or 18.  I told people that I did it to look old enough to buy beer, but the truth is, I just wanted to look older.  The combination of being a short kid—my “growth spurt” between 7th and 8th grade consisted of going from 4’1” to 4’6½”—and having an extreme babyface meant that I always felt like my outside wasn’t reflecting the maturity I felt on the inside.  Not that anyone is actually mature at that age, but it’s the age when you really want people to stop treating you like a “kid.”

By the time I turned 21, I’d been repeating the “it’s just so I can buy beer” line so much that I had managed to convince even myself, so I shaved it off on my 21st birthday: I didn’t need to look older any more, I said, because now I am older.  Except ... it really felt wrong somehow.  I didn’t really care for the way my face looked in the mirror, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  Must be that babyface, I thought.  For a few months I tried just a moustache, but that was disastrous.  Soon I was back to the full beard.

Now, many people say that, the first time they try to grow a beard, it itches too much.  Some give up entirely at this phase; others just perservere and eventually the itching goes away.  But I’m a freak of nature, I guess, because my beard never itches when it starts coming in.

But, for some insane reason, once I’ve had it for about 10 years or so, then it starts to itch.

The first time this happened, I suffered for a couple of days, and then I knew that I just had to shave my chin and start over.  But I was still scared of the babyface.  So I decided to go for a “General Burnside” cut.  (This is the fellow for whom “sideburns” are named.)

And this was when I realized: I have no chin.  I come by this honest—it’s my mother’s chin.  To call it a “weak chin” is being overly generous: in order for a chin to be “weak,” it must first exist, and mine ... doesn’t.  Once I had the full sideburns but a clean-shaven chin, I could see it instantly.  The beard was defining my jawline, and, without it, I just looked like a complete goober.  But it is what it is: every 8 – 15 years, the itching starts, and the shaving must be borne, despite the visual horror it produces.  The second time I went with the Burnside again; the third time, I did more of a Ben-Stiller-in-Dodgeball sort of cut.  Now we’ve come to the fourth time around, and I’ve done that again (mostly due to lack of imagination); of course, being older now, my facial hair is mostly white, so it’s not nearly as cool as Ben’s was.  My youngest child had never even seen my chin before (or at least not that she’d remember), so it came as a bit of a shock.  And pretty much all my friends and coworkers have had the experience of being able to say to me, at least once in my lifetime, “oh, hey, you’re right ... you really don’t have a chin.”

So that’s why I look the way I do this week.  Luckily, my facial hair—unlike the head hair—grows very fast, so it won’t take long before I’m back to looking like an itinerant hobo riding the rails.  Until then, I remain a stubbled, chinless wonder.  But not an itchy one.

[Our title comes from an old George Carlin routine that I used to know by heart.  If you haven’t heard it, you really should.]

The Salesman's Tale

As far as stories about one’s life go, everyone has a few that all their friends and acquaintances have heard ad nauseum, and a few that they love to tell and may or may not be a hit, and, if they’re very lucky, a few that they only tell occasionally, but are always entertaining when they do.  This is one of those for me.

Now, I’ve alluded to this story before, most particularly in my discussion of fate (or whatever you wish to call it).  In that story, I talked about how it was I came to work in a restaurant, even though I had been a professional programmer for several years at that point.  That restaurant was a small joint about a mile off the campus of George Mason University called the Mason Jar Pub.  We served sodas in Mason jars (get it?), but also beers and pizza and all the stuff that college students require.  This place was run by a snotty punk named Brian whose dad was in “construction” (air quotes used very advisedly) and had obviously been gifted the pub as baby’s first business.  He ran it with his girlfriend and a friend of theirs named Dana.  They ran it very poorly, and eventually the business ran out of money and Brian and friends ran out of town and none of us got to cash our final paychecks, which led to a number of uncomfortable days in court as we tried to get paid by the father.  Lessons were learned all around.  But, in the run-up to this inevitable debacle, the following thing happened which ended up changing the course of my life far more than my one missed paycheck.

Now, because I had gone to college previously, then dropped out (during which time I did the aforementioned professional programming), and was now back for a second tour, I was a bit older than most of my peers.  I was, in fact, just a wee bit older than Brian himself, and this was the point in my life when I learned that most people really can’t handle managing employees who have more age and experience than they themselves do.  The prime example of this was the reaction I got when I pointed out to Brian that I had some experience with computers, and I could give him a hand if he ever needed any help.  Said reaction was basically just a sneer.  I was one of the dumb college kids he had hired; obviously I was not to be allowed in the club with him and his girlfriend and Dana, who was the only one trusted with “the books.” I shrugged and went back to making calzones: no skin off my nose if he wanted to struggle with his new computer.

You see, there was this fellow named Tom Cooney was working for Sharp and had sold the Mason Jar Pub its first cash register.  He then sold them a computer to which you could download all the data from the cash register and then load that all into QuickBooks.  Provided you knew what you were doing, of course—this type of process was still a bit fiddly back in the early 90s.  And Brian and company most certainly did not know what they were doing.  They struggled with that damn computer constantly, and Dana was constantly calling Tom asking for help.¹  So I knew they could use my expertise.  But, if they were too proud to accept it, it was none of my concern.  I had been hired to sling pizzas and clean up the joint, and I was perfectly willing to do just that.

Now, the three twitbags couldn’t be around all the time.  Especially on the night shifts, there were often times when none of the three of them were available (or just didn’t want to be bothered).  For these occasions, there were two “assistant managers,” who happened to be senior ROTC students, as well as roommates and very good friends.  One was a pale, freckled redhead whose name I think was Lou; the other was a confident black man with glasses named Wayne.²  These were both big, burly men who were training to be Marines, older than most of my coworkers (still a bit younger than I was, of course).  I think that Brian thought that they were going to be “on his side” in the imaginary divide in his mind that existed between “management” and the rank-and-file.  But, the thing about middle managers is, if you treat them (and pay them) as badly as you do the low-level employees, they tend to side with the majority rather than the upper echelon.

So, one slow night I was working with Wayne and a couple of other people, and Wayne was bitching about how badly all us employees were being treated and how little we got paid compared to Brian and his coterie, who seemed to be pocketing all the money.  At some point, the discussion turned to sneaking a peek at the books.  After all, it was all on the computer, and the computer was right there in the office.  The office was locked from us paeons, of course, but Wayne, as the manager-in-charge, had the keys.  For emergency use only, theoretically, but ... perhaps finding out what was going on was an emergency, dammit!  (Had we known what was coming, we would have felt even more justified.)  The problem was, only Dana had the password to QuickBooks.  So Wayne turned to me.  “You know computers, right?” he asked me.  “You could hack in!”

I was not surprised at this misconception: that all us programmers know how to hack things.  I was a bit surprised to hear this future Marine lieutenant suggest something so morally ambiguous.  But, then again, Wayne himself often told us that his Marine instructors taught them to make a decision and stand by it: making a poor decision in the heat of battle can be bad, but hesitating and making no decisiono at all is often disastrous.³  So, after my initial shock, I set about explaining that I was never much of a hacker—in fact, the only thing I had ever successfully hacked was a copy-protected videogame on my Commodore 64, which tried to tell me it couldn’t run after X times because my trial period had ended.  I did in fact show that snarky videogame message who was the boss, but breaking a QuickBooks password was a whole different animal.  Computer security had advanced by about a decade at that point and I had spent zero of that intervening time keeping up with it.  “Well, take a look,” Wayne encouraged.  So I said I would.

And, perhaps 15 minutes later, I was ready to admit that there was literally no chance that I was smart enough to break into a password-protected QuickBooks account.  “Sorry,” I said, not all that sorry.  But Wayne was not deterred.

“Okay, but there’s got to be something you can do to fuck with them, right?” he suggested.  Well, okay, I was not bothered by being unable to hack, but this now felt like a challenge.  Surely any programmer worth their salt could do something to fuck with people, given free access to the physical machine.  I had certainly engaged in a few juvenile pranks with coworkers—both as the fucker and the fuckee—but a lot of those things were only effective against other programmers.  What I needed was something that would get under the skin of a normie.  So I started poking around to see what tools I had available to me.

And what I found was a hex editor.  Now, if you’re not a technogeek like myself, you might not know what this is.  It’s a program that will let you edit anything on the computer: data, commands, even the operating system itself.  It was exactly the thing I had used in my one and only successful hack.  You see, a videogame that keeps track of how many times it’s been played and then refuses to run necessarily has to store that count somewhere, and that means you can find that place and edit it, and change it to zero.  But there are two problems with this approach: first of all, you’d have to constantly change it back to zero every time the count got too high again, and secondly the people who programmed the videogame have obviously thought of this.  They don’t store the count as a raw value; it’s encoded somehow, so that even if you could find it and change the value to zero, that wouldn’t be read as “zero” by the program itself.  So I quickly realized that my “brilliant” plan could never work.  But I realized that, in my attempt to find where the data for the count was stored, I had stumbled across something even better: the place where the code to compare the count and show the snarky message was stored.

You see, on the one hand, figuring out exactly how a given piece of software works should be easy: it’s all just numbers, and the software authors can’t keep you from being able to read those numbers without also making it impossible for the computer to read them.  So, theoretically, you can just look at all the numbers in the software and see what it’s doing.  But, the tricky part is, the same number can be interpreted differently depending on context.  For instance, say you look at one byte in a piece of software and it happens to be hex 49.  Now, that might represent the number 73, which is just the hexadecimal number converted to decimal.  Then again, it might be a capital “I,” because that’s what hex 49 is on the ASCII chart.  Or it might be the lower byte of a two-byte number, or the upper byte, or the middle byte of a four-byte number.  Or it might actually represent an instruction: say, an immediate exclusive-or of the next byte with the “accumulator,” which is assembly-speak for “the current number we’re working with.”⁴  Which of those many things it actually is depends entirely on context: the only number that you’re 100% sure of is the very first one, and, after that, you have to deciper every number, in order, to figure out what the next one means.  If you lose your place, or if you miscount how long something is, then all of a sudden you’re interpeting number as letters and letters as instructions and instructions as numbers and you’re just fucked.  So, while it should be simple, in practice it’s very much not.

In the case of my videogame, the code which checked how many times it had been run and then conditionally displayed the annoying message was not near the beginning of the code, but it was jumped to near the beginning of the code, because that check was one of the very first things it did.  So I was able to find it and trace through it and eventually I found the “branch” instruction: the part that said, if the value is no good, jump to the code which displays the message and terminates the program.  And I replaced the “branch” instruction with hex EA, which is what we technogeeks call a “NOP”: a no-op.  So then, instead of branching when the number was too big, it just ... did nothing.  And, after the nothing, it proceeded with the regular videogame code.

And I could do all that because I had a hex editor, and that allowed me to search for certain byte sequences, identify them, and replace them with different sequences.  And then save the file, overwriting the old program with a new version which was almost identical to the old, but with one slight tweak.  Once you know how to do this type of thing, it’s pretty easy to extend that to other changes.  And one of the simplest edits of all is to replace one string with another.

See, your hex editor knows perfectly well that sometimes numbers represent letters, so you can tell it to search for a string, and it can do that fairly easily.  The longer the string, the more likely it is that a given set of sequential numbers will represent those letters and not just be a stunning coincidence.  And, once you find the string, you can easily overwrite it with a different string, as long as the new string is exactly the same length as the old one.  Now, if you happen to know something about the way the program was written, you can pretty easily replace a longer string with a shorter one: anything written in C, or a language that derives from C, will use a zero byte as a marker to mean “the string ends here.” So a 10-character string will actually be eleven bytes long: one byte per character and the zero byte at the end.  You could easily replace that with a 5-character string and just fill in the last 5 bytes with zeroes and Bob’s yer uncle.  What you can’t do (or can’t do safely at any rate) is replace a 10-character string with a 20-character one, because those last 10 bytes are going to overwrite something entirely different: if it’s another string, the program will end up displaying the latter half of your replacement string intead, which is maybe not too bad, but if it’s code, then the program will likely do very bad things as it starts interpreting your characters as instructions.  But, as long as the string is equal or shorter, you’re golden.

And, the thing is, it’s very rare to find a hex editor on a random computer.  The vast majority of users have no need for one.  Finding a hex editor on the accounting PC for a small college-town restaurant was just weird ... surreal, even.  I would eventually discover that our salesman friend Tom needed the services of an engineer-type, and the one he was using at that point was a bit sloppy.  He had been using the hex editor when he set up the computer, and just never bothered to delete it.  But, at the time, it felt almost like destiny: there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to this computer, but the presence of a hex editor opened up my possibilities quite a bit.

Now, back in those days, we didn’t have Windows.  Well, technically speaking we did, but its use wasn’t prevalent yet.  Most programs, including QuickBooks, just ran on the primitive system underlying Windows: DOS.  When you booted up a DOS computer, you were faced with what we called a “C prompt”: C:\> .  And you just typed the name of whatever program you wanted to run—perhaps qb for QuickBooks—and it ran.  Now, if you mistyped something (say, you accidentally fat-fingered a key and typed wb or qv instead of qb) you would get an error message.  Specifically, it would say “Bad command or filename.” Not that you’d be likely to mistype a two-letter command, but something longer, you might.  And the thing is, “Bad command or filename” is a really excellent string to search for in a piece of software, if you happen to know which piece of software is responsible for printing that “C prompt” and running whatever commands you enter.  Which I did.  So it was fairly trivial, given the hex editor, to find “Bad command or filename” and just replace it with a shorter string.  Like, say, “What the fuck?!?” Which is exactly what I did.

Needless to say, Wayne was tickled pink at the thought of poor Dana mistyping something and getting cursed out by her own computer.  I was a bit proud of myself: it was basically trivial for me, but it could seem like magic to the uninitiated.  And I thought nothing more about it.

Until ...

You see, what happened was that, sometime in the next few days, Dana was having some troubles with getting data downloaded from the cash register system and, naturally, she called Tom for tech support.  Not that tech support was really Tom’s thing—he was the salesman, recall—but the whole computer thing was, strictly speaking, on the side from his job at Sharp.  So he was tech support that day.  And, when you do tech support over the phone, you get into a sort of rhythm: “Okay, type this.  And what does it say?  Okay, then, type this next.  Now what does it say?” And so on and so forth, back and forth, until eventually poor Dana flubbed whatever she was supposed to have typed.

“Okay, type this command; now what does it say?”

“Ummm ...”

“Just tell me what it says on the screen.”

“Well ... it says ...”

“Yes? what does it say?”

“Well, it says ... ‘what the fuck’.”

Without missing a beat, Tom responded: “Somebody there knows computers.”

Or at least that’s the way he recounted the story when he told me about it later.  Because he started dropping by the Mason Jar Pub quite regularly after that, hoping to ferret out which employee had the secret computer knowledge.  And, eventually, he stumbled onto me.  And that’s how Tom Cooney became my first business partner: I became his new, not so sloppy, engineer, and I was introduced into the weird world of running your own business.  It’s part accountant, part movie producer, part one-man-band (even when you have partners or employees), part having the weight of the world on your shoulders, and part ultimate freedom from being told what to do by idiots with no vision.  I owe Tom a lot, but I think maybe I owe Wayne even more.  Without that juvenile prank, my life would have turned out very differently.  And maybe not better.

__________

1 This led to Tom and Dana actually dating briefly, if I recall correctly.

2 I mentioned Wayne—and this very story—in passing when discussing how much I owe to Bernice Pierce.

3 I stress this is all second-hand information from a single source, diluted by decades of intervening time and degrading memory.  I apologize to any of my readers with military experience if I’m misrepresenting the advice.

4 Note: I’m not stating categorically that 0x49 is an immediate XOR for a 6502 CPU; I’m about 4 decades out from even being able to follow the reference docs for that particular flavor of assembly, much less actually remembering it.  But I did look it up, and I’m pretty sure that’s right.

Don´t know why ... there´s no sun up in the sky ...

Today, we are getting a visit from Tropical Storm Hilary, which is just lovely.  I figured I’d traded all my hurricanes for earthquakes when I moved from the East Coast here to sunny Southern California.  But, if you can believe this shit, we actually had an earthquake during the tropical storm.  It was a 5.1, which is a decent-sized quake, as SoCal earthquakes go, but it was also only about 28 miles away from our house.  The house swayed like a North Carolina beach house in a tropical storm—for a few seconds I thought it actually was the tropical storm, but of course houses built on a foundation don’t really do that.

So, the earthquake was a minor bit of excitement in the midst of the ongoing torrential downpour, which is already starting to come through our garage roof.  Gotta look into getting that fixed at some point.  When you live in the desert, leaky roofs are not usually a priority.  But this year has been a bit of an exception in the rainfall department.

So the rain beats a loud tattoo on the patio outside the open window behind my head, and I continue to wait for the power to go out, though hopefully the solar battery will kick in.  And the encroaching night blankets us all.

Next week, something longer.

Music Discovery Story #2: Found Cassettes

[This is the second post in a sub-series of my music mix series.  It’s basically a story about some music discovery event in my life, so it’s a combo of music info and personal history info.  You can find a list of all the music stories in the mix series list.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

You may recall that music story #1 started like so:

Once upon a time, sound was recorded on wax cylinders, and you had to crank the phonograph yourself.  That didn’t last too long, though, and we invented vinyl.

Well, after vinyl, we invented a bunch of other formats, primarily trying to get more and mor portable.  (Please note that, just like last time, I’m deliberately not looking any of this up, so don’t expect 100% factual accuracy.)  We had reel-to-reel tape recorders, which honestly weren’t any more portable than record players, so I dunno where that came from.  And then we had 8-track tapes, which were portable enough to put into your cars, so that was a win.  It was a plastic rectangle, roughly the size of a large smartphone (or a small tablet), and it had 4 “channels” that you could switch between (it was called an “8”-track because each channel had two tracks, so you’d get stereo sound).  It was a wide tape on a continuous loop, and once it got to the “end” the head would just drop down to the next lower channel, or pop back up to the top if it had finished channel 4.  But there was also a button where you could switch the channel manually.  There was no rewind, since it was one big tape loop, and, while I’m sure some 8-track players had fast-forward capabilities, most of the time you just listened to whatever happened to be on that spot on the tape at the time.

The next evolution was cassettes, which were smaller (and therefore more portable), but they only had two “channels,” and, instead of the tape head moving, you physically had to take the cassette out and flip it over to hear the other channel.  So the music on one channel went from the beginning of the tape to the end, and the music on the other channel went from the end to the beginning.  This made rewinding necessary, so fast-forwarding was more common (if you’re making the player do the one, may as well have it do both), and it also meant that you could correspond the tape more closely to the original (vinyl) album: each format had two “sides,” so the entirety of side A of the ablum would go on the first channel of the cassette, and side B on the reverse.  This meant there would be blank space at the end of either one side or the other (the tape was made as long as the longer side), which was wasted tape, but it was still better than the old 8-tracks, which would often switch channels right in the middle of a song (typically with an audible “thunk” sound).  So overall it was better.

My father had reel-to-reel tapes, and he had 8-tracks, but, by the time I started buying my own music, it was cassettes all the way, baby.  I owned a metric shit-ton of cassettes at one point, even after CDs came out: I was daunted by the expense of trying to replace a huge cassette collection.¹  So I had many, many years of cassettes, from high school all the way to my second stint in college.  And what I want to tell you about today is the two times that I actually found cassettes and adopted them into my collection.

The first story is very simple.  I was walking back to my grandmother’s house from somewhere, and I found a copy of Ice Cream Castle on the sidewalk in a very battered case.  Though the plastic case was essentially destroyed, and the paper insert was pretty torn up, the cassette itself was in surprisingly good shape, and I counted myself lucky to have found it.  I only recognized one of the songs (undoubtedly “Jungle Love”), but I knew that the Time were a band associated with Prince, and had a role in the movie Purple Rain (which I hadn’t seen, admittedly).  Honestly, the music reminded me a lot of Prince, whose 1999 I had owned for many years and nearly worn out.  A lot of it was very silly, but it was good, and it was exactly the sort of thing that I enjoyed enough to play since I’d gotten it for free, but not nearly enough to have ever paid for the full album out of my own pocket, so I considered it a great find.²

The second story is more complex.  I went to college in two stints: my first two years were spent at two different colleges in two different states, then I dropped out for a few years, and then went back to school at a third college.  At the first school, I lived in the dorms; by the time of the third, I was paying for it myself and considered living in the dorm an unjustifiable expense.  Even then, though, I had a lot of friends who did live in the dorms, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with them (and even lived on my best friend’s dorm room floor for a brief period between houses, much to his roommate’s annoyance).  And the dorms in these two colleges all had elevators.³  As a freshman, my own dorm was 3 stories, so we mostly just used the stairs.  But there were other dorms where elevators were necessary, and all of the dorms at the last college had them, and so we spent a bunch of time on them, so we invented dumb things to do on them to keep ourselves amused.  The absolute dumbest of these was “bumper people,” a “game” in which one person would randomly shout “bumper people!” and everyone else would just put their hands down by their sides and start bouncing off the walls—and each other, of course—like we were balls in a small, jumbled pinball machine.  Woe betide anyone who’d never heard of this when it spontaneously erupted; initiation into the society of bumper people was disorienting, to say the least.

But it’s the other thing we often did in the elevators that is relevant to this story.  Someone long ago had figured this out and apparently passed it on throughout the years, so that we all learned to do it eventually ... at both schools, even.⁴  It was simple, really: you could put your fingers in the crack of the eleveator doors and just push them open.  It required a bit of strength, but it was surprisingly easy, especially if you could manage to get the proper leverage.  And the best bit was, you could even do this while the elevator was in motion, and, if you did that, the elevator would stop.  Completely.  Between floors.  And stay that way until you allowed the doors to close again.

Now, I’m not entirely sure why this fascinated us so much.  Perhaps just because the inside of the elevator shaft is a thing that the vast majority of us never get to actually see in real life.  We see it in the movies, sometimes, but who can say how accurate that is?  Well, anyone who attended either of these two universities⁵ in the 80s and 90s can say, and, as one such person, I’ll tell you that the primary difference between actual elevator shafts and what you see in the movies is that the cinematic versions are very clean.  In real life, elevator shafts are filthy, disgusting things, full of rust and grease and all the gunk and debris that slovenly college kids accidentally (or purposefully) drop into the crack between the elevator car and the outside doors.  In fact, part of the fun of stopping the elevator by opening the doors (this only opened the inside doors, of course) was to see what you could find in the empty spaces.  The outer doors weren’t solid, so there was plenty of room inside them for papers or whatever to get trapped by the curled metal edges.  And of course there was a set of outer doors for each floor, so there were a bunch of them to explore.  If you opened the doors all the way, you could actually see into the parts of the elevator shaft beyond the edges of the doors, and they too had little recesses and cubbies where detritus would fetch up.  I shudder to think how many times we stuck our entire arms between the car and the shaft, reaching for something that looked interesting.  Sure, the elevator was fully stopped at the time, but there was no way for us to be sure that that would hold.  We were young and stupid, of course, and convinced of our own immortality, so I don’t believe it ever even occurred to any of us that something might go wrong and the elevator might start up suddenly and, if that were to happen at such a time, someone was absolutely going to lose an arm.  Certainly it never occurred to me.

So we often stopped the elevator just to look and see what “treasures” we could find.  I have to put “treasures” in quotes, of course, because it was always trash.  There was never anything actually cool or useful that we found in the elevator shafts of the dorms at either of these schools.  Except, one time ...

During my freshman year, I got a job at a local sub shop.  Which delivered, so I spent probably just as much time running deliveries to places as I did making sandwiches.  The really interesting thing about this local (non-chain) sub shop was that it had a huge ice cream maker, a giant metal monster of a machine that you fed ice cream mix and whatever bits of flavoring you could imagine into, and you ended up with ... whatever ice cream.  I used to make ice cream too: I would feed entire packages of Oreos into the hole, or cut up pieces of strawberry cheesecake, or actual pistachios.  And of course we delivered that too.  In fact, sometimes people would call up and order nothing but ice cream, although you had to order a decent amount of it to hit the minimum order.  But people in the dorms would just get together with their neighbors and order a round of ice cream for the whole floor in the same way that they might all go in on a pizza.  So I spent a lot of time taking people bags of freshly made ice cream, and a lot of that time was spent in elevators.

There was one dorm in particular that was taller than all the other dorms.  I can’t remember exactly how big it was, but it was definitely the tallest dorm that I’ve ever been in, though of course not nearly the tallest building.  It was probably somewhere between 7 and 15 floors, and it was mostly upper class students.  I had a delivery one day around exam time to one of the girls’ floors near the top, and I brought them their favorite study aid: Oreo ice cream.  They were very happy to see me, and they paid me, and then I got back in the elevator for the long ride down.  I was all alone in the elevator car, and I must have been bored, because I decided to open the doors to look for cool shit in the crannies of the shaft.  I did so once and found nothing (as expected, really).  Then I closed the doors and went down a little further and opened them again, and I just stared in shock, because there was an actual thing.  A useful, even exciting thing, stuck in the hollow of the outer elevator doors, that was not trash.  It was a cassette by a band I’d never heard of before.  It was, in fact, In a Roman Mood, by Human Sexual Response.

Now, I hope I’ve managed to convey how extremely unlikely it was for me to find this cassette.  This was a Boston band who was barely known outside their native state, but someone had bought the cassette of their sophomore (lesser known) album and brought it to South Carolina, where they somehow managed to drop it into the crack of the elevator, where it fell down the shaft, not all the way to the bottom, but rather getting caught neatly inside one of the outer doors, where it did not break, or even crack, but sat patiently waiting for who knows how long until someone else—me—just happened to ride the elevator and just happened to know the trick of opening the doors while the car was in motion and just happened to pick the exact right spot to do it so that they would see this cassette.  This set of coincidences is so very unlikely, in fact, that for many years I didn’t believe it: I assumed that someone had deliberately placed it there.  Obviously they too knew the trick of opening the doors, and they just stuck the cassette there one day.  But why?  There’s no rational reason I could ever think of for it ...  Somebody stuck it in there for safekeeping, meaning to come back and get it later?  Rubbish.  Somebody left it there hoping it would be found by someone else as a way to pass on the music?  Nonsense: almost any other place in the universe would have been more likely to be discovered than this one.  About the best I could come up with was that someone stole it from someone else that they were very pissed at and “disposed” of the thing in this way.  Except ... again, why in the elevator shaft, when a trash can would have been far simpler and far more effective?  I just couldn’t wrap my brain around it.  While I’m not much inclined to believe that everything happens for a reason, things like this that have happened in my life do make me occasionally ponder whether fate might be an actual thing.

Now, my musical tastes are wide-ranging and eclectic, and I often go back and revisit periods in my musical history.  So, while I had never heard of Human Sexual Response at that time, perhaps I would have stumbled across them later.  They do have something of a reputation in new wave circles.  Of course, the vast majority of that reputation centers around their debut album, and the later single “Butt Fuck,” which caused a stir for obvious reasons.  And, here’s the thing: by this point in my life, I’ve heard the early HSR stuff.  It doesn’t particularly impress me.  Had I heard that stuff first, would I have even bothered to check out their second, less critically acclaimed, album?  And, the thing is, In a Roman Mood contains the excellent, nearly-impossible-to-describe “Land of the Glass Pinecones,” which is the mix starter for Totally Different Head, so that feels like a pretty serious deviation in my personal musical trajectory had I never discovered it.  Not to mention that the research for TDH is what led me to discover the music of HSR’s only female member’s daughter, Glasser, whose music is now slotted to appear in many of mixes (although so far we’ve only seen her pop up on Fulminant Cadenza).  So that original discovery had a small but very significant impact in my musical development, and it’s all thanks to stupid college elevator games.

Next time ... well, actually, I don’t have anything planned for next time in this sub-series.  But so far I’ve covered vinyl and tape, so obviously the next topic must be: digital.

__________

1 Eventually what happened was that about half my cassettes got stolen, and at that point I figured, WTF: may as well start buying the replacements on CD.

2 I never did buy it on CD, but I have a digital copy now.

3 At the second school, I neither lived in nor knew anyone who lived in the dorms, so it doesn’t figure much into the story.

4 I’m pretty sure I didn’t carry the practice from one school to the other; I think I’d remember that.  But I can’t swear to it.

5 At least!  Probably folks at other schools knew this trick as well.

A bit of a cliché, but true nonetheless

While I’m not in general fond of “man it sucks getting old” posts, I do have to say that, of late, I definitely have been feeling my age.  Nothing major in the health department, really ... just your standard quantity of aches and pains that inevitably come with the wearing out of joints and the brittleness of bones.  There’s nothing to be done about it, per se, but I’m not sure I really need to do anything about it.  Overall, I’m fairly lucky, so I feel a bit ungrateful whining about the advancing years.  As they say, it’s better than the alternative.  Still, ...

Getting old does kinda suck.  Sometimes.

Music Discovery Story #1: The Reject Box

[This is the first post in a sub-series of my music mix series.  It’s basically a story about some music discovery event in my life, so it’s a combo of music info and personal history info.  You can find a list of all the music stories in the mix series list.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

Once upon a time, sound was recorded on wax cylinders, and you had to crank the phonograph yourself.  That didn’t last too long, though, and we invented vinyl.  Even in these modern times most people know what vinyl is, though I’m not sure how many know about the different types.  So this may be review for many, but perhaps some folks will learn something.

The first vinyl records to gain popularity were thick discs roughly the size of a Frisbee,¹ and they were designed to be played while spinning at a speed of 78 revolutions per minute: thus, they were 78rpm records, or, colloquially, just plain 78s.  Of course, they were (probably—I admit I’m not really a scholar on this topic or anything) only called that in retrospect, once someone invented a record that was designed to be played at a different speed.  Which eventually happened, in the form of 33rpm records.  33s were a bit thinner, but, most importantly, they held more songs.  An average 78 could only hold a song or two on each side (vinyl is double-sided, remember), but a 33 can comfortably fit 4 or 5 songs per side.  And thus was born the “album,” a record containing 8 to 10 songs, usually by the same artist, which (in the best cases) all had some connecting thread.

Of course, sometimes you don’t want a whole album.  Somtimes you just want one song.  You know, the hit song off of the album.  So we invented 45s: a much smaller disc which only held one song—well, technically, one song per side.  Typically that would be a hit song from the album on one side, with a lesser known track from the album (what today we might call a “deep cut”) on the other side.  In the jargon of the day, they would be known as the “hit side” and the “flip side,” respectively, and the 45 itself would be referred to as a “single” (despite having two songs on it).

Now, if you’re very young, you might think this is all ancient history.  But I’m old enough to remember owning a record player that played at all 3 speeds: 45, 33, and 78 (and that was, strangely, the order they were usually listed in), although I also remember that the cheaper ones only came in 45 and 33 because the 78s were already considered old tech by that point.  And, in case you think that that just makes me a very old man, I’ll remind you that my father is still alive, and not even in a nursing home or anything.  He’s an older gentelman, sure, well past retirement age, but he’s still young enough to hang around all day enjoying his hobbies.  And one of those hobbies—the main one, really—is collecting records.  Specifically singles.  Of which he currently has not just thousands but tens of thousands.  It would not at all surprise me if he were closing in on 100,000 by this point.

And here’s where the history of vinyl intersects with my own personal history.  Since I was around 10 years old, my family lived in a house that they built: it was originally an empty frame on a piece of land that my grandfather owned ... someone had started to build a house there and never finished.  My dad had a friend who was a contractor, and they made a few minimal changes to the plans and finished the house.  One of those minimal changes was the garage.  It was originally designed to be a two-car garage, although it was awkwardly positioned in relation to the driveway: in order to park your car, you’d have to drive to the end of the drive, then make a hard right turn into the garage and pray you didn’t hit the side of the garage door opening.  My dad said, screw that: just turn the garage door into a wall and we’ll use it as an extra room.  Of course, the concrete garage floor was already poured, and there was no plan for ducts in there, so it was always going to be a room that was a bit too cold in the winter and a bit too hot in the summer, but that was fine.  For the first few years of my life, my dad I shared the space, but eventually all my games and toys got displaced as the record collection grew.  Nowadays there are not only shelves of records covering 3 of the 4 walls, but also some rows of shelves like you see in an old movie, set in a library, where someone pushes one over and they all go down like dominoes.  Plus several turntables, a reel-to-reel recorder or two, a whole bunch of speakers, and a jukebox from the 50s.  At least that’s what it looked like the last time I saw it.

Of course, you may well wonder how someone manages to accumulate that many records.  Well, there are many different ways, but there’s one in particular I want to talk to you about.

When I was a baby, we lived in Franklin, which is a small town just north of the Virginia–North Carolina border and about halfway between the Atlantic and the place where the Tidewater region (the coastal plain) gives way to the Piedmont region (the Appalachian foothills).  And my father worked part-time as a DJ for a small local station.²  Makes sense for a record guy, right?  He knew a lot about music, and about how to spin records, and it was a little extra cash in his pockets.  Now, this station³ was, at the time, a top-40 station (this would be the late 60s, early 70s, I’d say).  When I was a bit older, it decided to transition to being an oldies station, and, at that point, they went back to my father: you used to work here part-time, they said, so we know you, and you’re a record collector, so you know a lot about this oldies stuff: be our program director, make us up some playlists, you can do it in your spare time (we can’t afford to pay you much anyway) and it’ll be a little extra cash in your pocket just like the old days ... whaddaya say?  And my father, shrewd man that he is, says: actually, I don’t need any cash in my pockets just now, because I’ve just started a great new job at the local paper mill.  But you know what I do need?  Records.

Perhaps a brief diversion on how the symbiotic relationship between the record industry and the radio stations used to work is in order.  See, the record companies needed the radio stations to play the songs they wanted to push.  And the radio stations needed not to have pay for a shitload of records: just running the station is expensive enough.  So the record companies would send records to the radio stations—not whole albums, of course: just the singles.  Sometimes the regular singles, and sometimes “promos,” which is what they used to call a single that had the hit side on both sides.  That way, when the radio station wore out the grooves on one side, they could just flip it over and keep right on spinnin’.  Sometimes the promos came in sleeves with clever slogans on them like “when you play it, say it!”—by which the record companies meant, when you play the song on the radio, make sure you tell people who it is so they can go out and buy it and make us rich(er).  Now, this particular radio station in Franklin that we’re talking about was no longer going to be playing top 40 songs ... but the records companies didn’t know that.  Some of them would figure it out pretty quickly, of course, and all of them would figure it out eventually, but in the meantime, they’d still be sending all these records to the station, and the station was never going to use any of them.  Nothing to do but throw ’em away ... or give them to their new program director in lieu of cash.

So now you may be wondering what my dad wanted with all these records.  After all, he was a child of the 50s, and early rock-and-roll was his primary jam.  All this “modern” stuff coming out (at this point in the story, we’ve advanced to the early 80s), he had no clue what it was and no real taste for it.  Well, the thing is, my dad was one of those serial collectors: he had tried collecting coins, and he’d tried collecting stamps, and he’d finally settled on records.  And, in every case, he liked to set himself a goal: one of every stamp the post office released since year X, say, or one of every year of penny (from each different mint) since the invention of the modern penny.  With records, he had settled on a 45 of every song that ever charted on the Billboard Hot 100, since it was first published (which I believe was approximately 1948).  Now, since that chart is published every week, you may be thinking to yourself that this is an impossible number of records.  But of course from one week to another it’s mostly the same songs, so it’s not really 100 every week, 5200 every year ... but it’s still a lot.⁴

Perhaps you can finally see where this story is going.  A pipeline has been established: the record companies press singles for songs that may or may not become hits, they send them to a radio station that has no use for them, who passes them on to my record collector father who has no way whatsoever to know which of them are going to make the charts and which won’t, and so he separates out the few names he recognizes from the ones he has no clue about, and the latter batch ... well, they go into a box that was known around my house (and I can’t remember if this was his name or mine) as the reject box.

I cannot begin to describe how much music I discovered for the first time in the reject box.  That’s where I first found “Burning Down the House” by the Talking Heads and “Abacab” by Genesis, “The One Thing” by INXS and “She’s a Beauty” by the Tubes.  And that’s just the stuff that you will have heard of ... remember in 80s My Way I when I told you about “Welcome to the Universe” and you probably replied “WTF??” or in Smooth as Whispercats II when I mentioned “One Simple Thing” and you were like “where did that come from?” The reject box: that’s where they came from.  I used to spend hours flipping idly through the reject box, just playing shit for no other reason than the name of the band caught my eye, or the name of the song sounded cool.  Since it was impossible to tell which side was the hit side (unless it was a promo), I might try both sides, just to hear what was going on.  They weren’t all great, of course ... although I of course don’t remember the duds.  Just the successes.  And not just mine: my best friend Mackey is the one who pulled “She’s a Beauty” out of the reject box and turned me on to the Tubes.  Although I can’t necessarily list more titles off the top of my head, I will still, to this day, occasionally play a song from my collection and have the sudden recognition that I first discovered it in the reject box.  So it’s had a profound impact on my musical development, through a somewhat bizarre set of happenstances that might, just maybe, be unique in the history of music lovers.

And that’s why I wanted to share it with you, faithful reader.  The vagaries of memory being what they are, I probably got a bunch of stuff wrong, and I deliberately decided not to look up the history of vinyl records, so I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff wrong there too.  But this is my story, so I get to tell it like I want to ... like I remember it.  And I remember it fondly.

__________

1 Although I suppose if you don’t know what a 78 is, the chances that you know what an actual Frisbee is are not so great either.

2 I’ve heard that my mother did a few shifts too, but I don’t know if that was an official job for her or if maybe she just filled in for my dad on occasion.

3 I’ve valiantly attempted to figure out what station it actually was, but I’m pretty sure it’s not there any more, and the Internet doesn’t seem too useful for investigating the history of radio stations that had disappeared before it even existed.

4 These days, he’s given up keeping up with the modern stuff and I believe he’s set a cutoff of 1979 or so.

Origin of the Love of the Species

[Last night, I had a dream.  In this dream, I was explaining to someone where I got my love of animals.  I can’t remember exactly who I was explaining it to—I think maybe I had become famous for something or other and I was being interviewed.  In any event, this was one of those dreams that I had no recollection of upon waking (crowded out by other dreams, I think), but came to me nearly complete about half an hour later.  And it struck me (somewhat forcefully) that, had I been asked the question while I was awake, some of the things I said in the dream would have never occurred to me.  But sometimes dreams are good for that: remembering things you thought you’d forgotten, or even realizing things you never actually knew.  So I threw off my original plans for this week’s post, and I’m giving you this post instead, which combines both the answer I would give while conscious and, apparently, the answer I would give while asleep.]

My love of animals has always been a defining part of me, as long as I can remember.  In fact, I have a very clear memory of one Christmas, when I was very young—this may actually be my earliest childhood memory that isn’t a false one¹—when I had asked for a Noah’s Ark for Christmas and both sets of grandparents got me one.  The memory is of me on the landing of my grandparents’ house (on my mother’s side), which was halfway down the stairs (unlike in most houses, these stairs were more like the stairs in an apartment building or office building: you walked halfway down the stairs to the landing, then made a U-turn and walked the rest of the way down).  My mother was holding me in her arms, waiting for the rest of the adults below to give us the go-ahead that everything was prepared just so, and everyone was ready with their cameras and whatnot, and she was whispering in my ear that I shouldn’t be disappointed for getting the same gift twice and that I needed to act surprised and pleased.  In many ways, this sums up a pretty big chunk of my childhood: my mother, very preoccupied with other people’s opinions and desperate never to disappoint anyone, advising me how to think or react or feel.  The funny thing is, she needn’t have bothered.  I think my grandparents, at least on one side, were thrilled with my request for a Noah’s Ark, because they assumed it was a sign that I was properly absorbing my religious indoctrination.  The truth was, I was just in it for the animals—the boats were no different than a cardboard box or a zip-loc bag as far as I was concerned, and the human figures (if there even were any) were promptly lost.  All I cared about were the animals, and, you see, in two sets of of Noah’s Arks, there are twice as many animals, and many of them are different.  I didn’t have to fake anything.

My grandfather’s house, as it happens, is the very thing that I recently recalled as probably being instrumental to my love of animals, even though I never really realized it before.  My mother’s father, like 3 out of my 4 grandparents, grew up on a farm.  He knew a lot about nature: he was an amateur botanist, grew tomatoes professionally for a while, and knew how to skin a rabbit, as I discovered once in a rather horrifying manner which probably scarred me for life.  But he was also the only one of my grandparents to attend college, and ended up making the most money.  My grandparents on that side were what I like to call “small town rich:” in New York or Chicago, they might have been considered moderately well-off, but in the small town where I grew up (and where I was born, and where both my parents were born, and where this very grandfather attended high school, becoming a member of the very first graduating class of the same high school from which both my parents and I later graduated), in this small town, as I say, they were considered rich.  I think the story is that my grandfather made some money with his contracting business and ended up buying a huge tract of land that would later be developed into one of the two swanky neighborhoods in my town, and then made even more money selling off most of it for other rich people to build their houses on.  But he kept about an acre and a half, and that was where he built his house.  It wasn’t a mansion (small town rich, remember?), but it was a big, two-story house that was built into a side of a hill, so that from the front it looked like a one-story house, and then when you walked out the back door, you were on a balcony that ran the length of the house, looking out on his “yard” ... and that’s where the magic really was.

Because an acre and a half probably doesn’t sound like much compared to some of the compounds of the ultra-wealthy we might see on television, but let me assure you: an acre and a half is enormous to a five-year-old, a seven-year-old ... even a ten-year-old.  By the time I was in high school (perhaps even middle school—my memory for dates grows hazy with age, as it does for us all), they had sold the place and moved to Florida, as grandparents are wont to do, but a lot of my very formative years were spent there, wandering the grounds of this magical place.  Being the amateur botanist and later tomato farmer, for my grandfather this was mostly about his prize azaleas, which he cloned and grafted like some mad plant scientist; I even remember accompanying him on trips into the Appalachian mountains, looking for wild azaleas to infuse his creations with new genetic stock.  So there were a lot of azaleas, but also rhododendrons and flowering dogwoods and many other plants that I can’t remember and probably never even learned; there were gravel-paved walkways through flowers with riotous colors, and long greenhouses full of experiments (and, later, tomatoes).  But all that was window dressing, because for me it was all about the animals.

To the left of the house was a small pond where I used to catch tadpoles.  Since the whole place was built into a hill, that pond turned into a one-story waterfall that filled a much bigger pond.  (And, though I didn’t understand it till much later, there was a pump at the bottom of the big pond that constantly shunted water back up the little pond to keep the system going.)  In this pond were bullfrogs of truly impressive size: my mother said that my grandfather used to go “gigging” in his pond when she was younger, to catch frogs so he could enjoy frog legs for dinner.  There were of course various birds that were attracted to this waterscape: wading birds and the occasional duck or goose flying by during a migration.  The water flowed down articial canals that paralleled the flower-lined walkways and fed other ponds in other places.  There were water lillies and any number of water-loving insects: water striders and boatmen and dragonflies.  There were fish in the ponds too, of course: ornamental koi in the main pond at the bottom of the waterfall, and other, mostly smaller, fish throughout the system.  Rabbits lived there, as did moles, both of which my grandfather murdered happily (they were considered pests).  There were multitudes of squirrels, which my grandmother fed stale cheese crackers to in a large “bird” feeder attached to the balcony.  The kitchen had a sliding glass door, so you could sit at the kitchen table and watch the birds and the squirrels fighting over the bird seed and the sunflower seeds and the old crackers.  The squirrels were the most entertaining, of course, but you could also see cardinals and blue jays and robins, which their distinctive orange breasts, and occasionally chickadees or finches.  There were foxes and raccoons too, though I mostly knew of those from stories my mother told; I can’t recall ever seeing any personally, though I was always on the lookout.  At night you might see a possum, though, which are kind of scary in a way you don’t really realize until you meet one in person.  Also at night, the sound of the bullfrogs was nearly overwhelming, backed up by the crickets ... so many orthopterans: field crickets, grasshoppers, kaytdids.  In fact, it was trivial to catch field crickets, which we often did, and my grandparents even had a gold colored cage that sat on the hearth where we often put a cricket so you could listen to it indoors as well (but also let it go again when the sound inevitably became annoying).  There were chipmunks sometimes, and once or twice a larger rodent which might have been a muskrat or woodchuck.  I remember discovering rolie-polies, which my mother always called “sow bugs” for some reason,² and also digging for earthworms.  I’m pretty sure there were lizards, and of course my grandfather had a few turtles in the ponds, and there were probably a few snakes here and there, though I can’t recall for sure.  Lots of spiders too, and the occasional tick, which I learned at a fairly young age how to detach and kill (with a match, in an ashtray, till they popped).  Ticks and mosquitoes were about the only things I ever killed though: as far as I was concerned, if it was trying to suck your blood, it was fair game, but otherwise live and let live.  I was mostly horrified at my grandfather’s tendency to kill things he found annoying, and I already mentioned how disturbing it was to go into one of the many tool sheds attached to the greenhouses one day and find an inside-out rabbit, which my grandather was apparently curing, stretched out up on a high wall.  And don’t even get me started on the complicated mole traps, with their trip wires and cruel spikes.  But, for the most part, every trip in my grandfather’s “back yard” was a wildlife safari for me, and I have the fondest memories of those times.

I always asked for animal-related things.  I got a set of wildlife encycolpedias and read them nearly cover to cover, which is why I know a lot of the scientific classifications of things, like how spiders are arachnids not insects, but both arachnids and insects are arthropods, as are crustaceans, which rolie-polies are (the only land-dwelling crustaceans, in fact), and that ferrets and weasels are not rodents but rather mustelids, which are carnivores, similar to felines and ursines, and that the rodent-looking hyrax is most closely related to the elephant, and that a hyena is not a canine regardless of the fact it really looks like one, and that anemones are coelenterates (like coral) while sea liliies are echinoderms (like starfish) even though they both look like plants, and that earthworms are actually annelids (like leeches) while “true” worms are divided into flatworms, roundworms, and ribbon worms, and a bunch of other useless zoological trivia.  Of course, those encyclopedias are now nearly 50 years old, which is why I still get surprised sometimes when zoologists have changed their minds since then and I find out that skunks aren’t mustelids any more and rabbits aren’t rodents any more and the coelenterates have been broken up into the cnidarians and the ctenophorans (because a comb jelly isn’t really a jellyfish, apparently) and birds and reptiles are all the same thing now (goes along with dinosaurs having feathers).  Not to mention that I can still be surprised by the occasional nature documentary, or (in particular) watching Octonauts with my youngest child, when they talk about animals that hadn’t been properly classified or even discovered at all when my primary reference materials were written, such as the vampire squid or the blobfish.  Of course, I didn’t rely solely on a single source, and, after seeing some commercial on late afternoon television, I talked my grandmother on the other side into subscribing to a set of “animal cards,” which would come 10 or 20 or so to a pack, every month, and then whenever I’d go to that grandparents’ house I’d eagerly open all the packs that had come since I was last there and see all the new animals, and then I’d carefully put them in order in my handy plastic container: not in alphabetical order, of course, but in order by Linnaean taxonomy, making my own choices for the evolutionary order of the phyla, based mainly on my devouring of the aforementioned encyclopedias.  They didn’t always agree, and that irked me,³ but I kept on collecting them, until I needed to convince my grandmother to order a second container for the cards, and eventually she figured out that they were never going to stop sending her packs of cards (for a small monthly charge, of course) and she cancelled them.  Somehow I managed to retain the encyclopedias, although they’re much the worse for wear at this point, but those cards are long lost.

So, you see, I was really into animals as a kid.  That also extended to the media I consumed and my make-believe a lot of the time:⁴ I was really into Tarzan, and The Jungle Book, and Dr. Dolittle.  Of course, now I know enough to recognize that there’s a lot of problematic material in these stories, but not only was I too young to get that as a kid, I was also just glossing over the parts where the people were interacting.  I only cared about the animals.  If Tarzan was making friends with elephants, or Mowgli was being taught by a panther, or Dr. Dolittle was talking to flying fish, then I was paying attention.  The insensitive portrayals of indigenous people didn’t register for me: not because they were indigenous, but because they were people.  Unless you were an animal, or at the very least a human who could communicate on some level with an animal, I wasn’t too interested.  I also had a bunch of books from the perspective of animals: I particularly recall a set of books consisting of, I think, Black Beauty, Bambi, one of the Lassie books, a book about a raccoon, and perhaps one or two others ... Gentle Ben? Misty of Chincoteague?  I read them all so long ago I can barely remember any of the details ... I do have a memory of Lassie’s owner hiring a stranger to feed her some meat which made her mildly ill so that she would learn to never accept food from strangers, a trick which I found both cruel and clever.  But there were many more books to come, and movies (The Secret of Nimh and the wizard battle from The Sword in the Stone) and television (Cricket on the Hearth and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi) and even continuing into adolescence, when I discovered more sophisticated stories such as Watership Down.  I was also into any stories of people who could transform into animals, from Manimal to Maya from Space: 1999, which led to my predilection for playing druids in D&D.

And that doesn’t even begin to get into my pets: as a child, I had dogs, parrakeets, hamsters, fish, and turtles; as an adult I expanded into cats, ferrets, guinea pigs, and ball pythons.  I’ve also lived with iguanas, leopard geckos, rats, frogs, and bearded dragons, and suffered through my grandmother’s chicken coop and my mother’s attempts to keep rabbits and even squirrels.  I used to pet-sit for a tortoise, and I once had a good friend who was a beekeeper (and I only ever got stung once—valuable lesson: don’t stand directly in front of the hive, because that’s like standing in the middle of a busy bee highway).  Today we’re down to 2 dogs, 3 cats, and a relatively teeming tank of tropical fish, shrimp, snails, and one seemingly immortal dwarf African frog, but there’s constant talk of another bearded dragon, so who knows what the future will bring.

If you clicked on the link in the paragraph above, you read some of my thoughts on animals and how they’re people too.  Human beings who have the attitude that someone is “just an animal” and therefore not deserving of love or kindness due to having too much body hair or lack of opposable thumbs really irk me, and I’m sorry if you happen to be such a one.  For me, I’ve spent my whole life reading about, talking to, and interacting with animals, and not just the cute and cuddly ones.  All of them.  Sure, many of them are pretty dumb: a firefly, for instance, is never going engage with you on an intellectual level.  But, on the other hand, when you let that little guy crawl over your hand in the fading summer twillight, and he suddenly glows that greenish-yellow glow ... if that doesn’t touch you on a spiritual level, you are definitely doing something wrong in your life.  And that’s a friggin’ bug, man: the joy and affection you can receive from spending time with a ferret, the amiable call and response you can have with a guinea pig, if you learn to emulate its whistle, the comfort you can derive from having a ball python snuggled around your shoulders—these things cannot be replicated by humans.  Animals are not better than humans, of course, just different, and, if you think they are somehow lesser than, perhaps you’re not paying close enough attention.  Or perhaps you just missed out on a childhood spent in a huge back yard, learning about the diversity of life.

__________

1 And then again it might also be a false memory: childhood memories are slippery.

2 They have many, many names, as it happens: pillbugs, woodlice, doodle bugs, etc etc.

3 I’ve talked a bit about my OCD-adjacent obsession with lists of animals (and other things) in part I of my D&D and Me series.

4 And I talked about this in D&D and Me part 4.